Introduction:

Narrativizing Novel Studies, Historicizing

Narrative Theory

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Paul Dawson
University of New South Wales

Abstract The novel is both a type of narrative and a distinct literary genre. This intro-
duction argues that theoretical accounts of formal elements of narrative fiction, on the
one hand, and historical investigations into the development of the novel, on the other,
suffer from a lack of methodological exchange. It sketches out the interrelated disci-
plinary histories of the fields of narrative theory and novel studies and anatomizes the
theoretical ground they share in determining their objects of study before identifying
four topics of convergence: fictionality, surface reading and computational narratol-
ogy, diachronic narratology and novelistic history, political criticism and new technol-
ogies. These topics provide a frame for ongoing debates which the essays in this special
issue seek to engage with and intervene in.
Keywords narratology, novel studies, fictionality, distant reading, surface reading

This special issue of Poetics Today is designed to issue a challenge: how can
we develop more sustained and productive theoretical and methodological
exchanges between the broad fields of novel studies and narrative theory?
The polemical fault lines between these two scholarly enterprises are well
established. One is historical, ideological, thematic, and interpretative; the
other is ahistorical, scientific, formalist, and abstract. These distinctions are
simplistic but recognizable and retain a rhetorical force that frames our sense
of the challenge. The research questions and methods of novel studies and

Poetics Today 39:1 (February 2018) DOI 10.1215/03335372-4265035

q 2018 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
2 Poetics Today 39:1

narrative theory differ as a result of divergent intellectual traditions, but the

internal criticisms of both have typically converged in charges that they are
founded on an untenable, restrictive focus on modern canonical texts to
exemplify their respective objects of study: the novel is English realism,
and narrative is the novel. A desire to unravel this nexus has provided the
point of departure for new scholarship over the past few decades. It must be
said, though, that calls for greater dialogue between the two fields tend to be
one-sided. There is a trend for narratologists both to engage with cultural and

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historical concerns and to promote the value of narratological methods for
close textual analysis, but there is no comparable trend for novel studies to
engage more substantially with narratology. The case for this remains strong,
however, because novel studies is ineluctably concerned with narrative not
only as an inherent feature of the novel itself but as a critical practice which
relies on narrativizing the relation of the novel to history.
The challenge resides in how to negotiate the historically informed disci-
plinary boundaries that frame these two scholarly endeavors. On a larger
scale, this means reconciling the broad cultural understanding of narrative
that informs work in novel studies, exemplified by the influence of Fredric
Jameson’s “political unconscious,” with the more strictly narratological con-
cern with the shared formal properties of narrative artifacts stemming from
the influence of structuralist poetics. This involves two things: addressing the
way these two scholarly traditions have developed alongside each other and
laying out the theoretical ground they share in determining their objects of
study.

1. Disciplinary History

One way to address the relation between narrative theory and novel stud-
ies is to consider their institutional framing as disciplines. As a shorthand
approach, we can look at the development of representative journals in the
Anglo-American academy. The official journal of the Society for Novel
Studies (established in 2012) is Novel: A Forum on Fiction. This journal was
founded in 1967 and was promoted as a forum for sorting out existing critical
debate on the novel, with the editorial for the inaugural issue stating: “We
will invite readings, then, which accommodate the novel’s breadth, depth
and variety as a literary form; we will cover the novel’s history in all litera-
tures; and we will serve as a clearinghouse for theory. We believe that the
novel is moving toward a ‘poetics’ like those which older forms enjoy, and
toward readings of the greatest possible relevance” (“On Box 1984” 1967: 5).
By the thirtieth anniversary edition in 1997, the founding editor, Mark Spilka
(1997: 6), felt confident in writing, “The journal has more or less completed its
 Dawson † Introduction 3

initial mission as a clearinghouse for novel theory and critical practice within
and beyond the formalist tradition.” Novel studies, it would seem, had moved
on from the need for a poetics to take up the more pressing challenges pre-
sented by post-structuralist theory, ideological criticism, and cultural studies.
The Journal of Narrative Technique was founded in 1971 (and noted as a new
rival, along with Studies in the Novel, in the tenth anniversary edition of Novel: A
Forum on Fiction). In winter 1999 the title changed to Journal of Narrative Theory
( JNT ), which the editorial (Dionne and Wojcik-Andrews, 1999) states was

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“to signal our commitment to the latest interdisciplinary research in literary
studies.” The change from technique to theory, the editors explain, “expands
the interpretive boundaries to include more broadly historical and cultural
influences of narrative,” hence following the same trajectory as Novel. JNT
became the official journal of the Society for the Study of Narrative Litera-
ture (founded in 1986) until a new journal, Narrative, was established in 1993.
As further evidence of the desire to expand the scope of narrative theory
beyond fiction, the society later changed its name to the International Society
for the Study of Narrative.
The first issue of Narrative included a debate between Ralph Rader and
Michael McKeon that neatly demonstrates the methodological and dis-
ciplinary tensions between an intrinsic formalist and a historically framed
approach to the emergence of the English novel as a distinct genre. It also
included an article by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse called
“History, Poststructuralism, and the Question of Narrative.” In this article
the authors point out that the development of post-structuralism forced
aside questions of narrative that had been ushered in by structuralist poetics,
questions which needed to be reconsidered, particularly to determine how
narrative differs from categories such as discourse, écriture (writing), and tex-
tuality. In describing their then forthcoming book (Imaginary Puritans), the
authors state: “Our project rests on the hypothesis that narrative is an act
of articulation that makes, remakes, and naturalizes certain cultural materials
and the categories that organize them. Narrative might, in other words, be
called the trace of intellectual labor, a reproduction that adds something to
existing cultural materials in a way that puts them quite literally in the past”
(Armstrong and Tennenhouse 1993: 46). With this premise in place, “our task
became that of examining historical, literary, and theoretical accounts of
modernity and to discover, in each case, what must have been left out so
that the account might ring true” (ibid.: 47). This broad postmodern concept
of narrative suits a historical and sociological approach to the genre of the
novel and is indicative of the influence of thinkers such as Jean-Franc ois
Lyotard and Jameson. In The Political Unconscious, for instance, Jameson
(1981: 13) notes that he draws upon the pioneers of narrative analysis (citing
4 Poetics Today 39:1

Northrop Frye, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Sigmund Freud, Claude Lévi-

Strauss, and György Lukács as these pioneers) to “restructure the prob-
lematics of ideology, of the unconscious and of desire, of representation, of
history, and of cultural production, around the all-informing process of nar-
rative, which I take to be (here using the shorthand of philosophical idealism)
the central function or instance of the human mind.”
Armstrong went on to assume the editorship of Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and
this concept of narrative is evident in her 2009 introduction to the triple-

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decker special issue on “Theories of the Novel Now” commemorating forty
years of the journal. Extrapolating from the contributions to describe “The
Way We Read Now,” Armstrong notes that novel theory no longer seeks “a
formal morphology” (E. M. Forster), or to characterize the genre as a bearer
of enlightenment and liberal morality (F. R. Leavis), or an expression of the
middle class (Ian Watt). Instead, the dominant mode of reading approaches
the novel as a privileged participant in the discursive construction of historical
narratives and hence as a genre through which we might read the contested
narrative of history itself. “In following the Jamesonian mandate ‘always
historicize,’ the tendency now is to show how the novel calls attention to
official history, not as the grounding for narrative events but as the insti-
tutional means of authorizing narratives that naturalize the dominant ideol-
ogy” (Armstrong 2009: 173). History thus becomes one of many competing
ideological narratives. Echoing her sentiments from the 1993 article in Nar-
rative, Armstrong writes: “From this it follows that a number of novels from
such a place and time should tell us not only what a novel had to include in
making the world seem comprehensible and comprehensive but also what the
novel had to keep out and at bay in order for that world to seem at once
coherent and convincing. In this respect, novels can be said to provide us with
a truer history than history proper” (ibid.). It is difficult to comprehend how a
knowledge of what the novel had to keep at bay could be arrived at without
recourse to history proper, but this editorial demonstrates the broader posi-
tion that novel studies has adopted in the wake of the transdisciplinary
narrative turn in the humanities and social sciences.
Poetics Today was founded in 1979, and its inaugural editorial outlined its
particular focus this way: “Poetics is the systematic science of literature —
literature as art, literature as communication, literature as an expression of
culture in history and as personal creation” (Hrushovski: 5). The guiding
principle of the journal is thus methodological, and semiotics and narratology
have historically provided the basis for this systematic approach. How can a
systematic approach to narrative in its broadest sense help inform narrato-
logical contributions to the study of the novel? The question depends, of
 Dawson † Introduction 5

course, on what a novel is and what narrative is or, in more recent parlance,
what constitutes narrativity.

2. Defining the Novel and Narrative

The object of study for novel studies is clear: the novel as a literary genre —
except, of course, that defining this object is notoriously difficult. In their
introduction to The Encyclopedia of the Novel the editors point out that in decid-

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ing on the scope of reference, they had to consider what actually constitutes a
novel. While they felt a novel ought to be in prose and have a narrative, they
recognized there are novels without these things, novels without characters,
and novels that are not fictional. They point out that a rough consensus
would likely coalesce around Mikhail Bakhtin’s claim for the novel as anti-
genre that parodies all previous literary forms. Despite the generic looseness
that characterizes the term, we can see that “extended fictional prose narra-
tive” would serve as a kind of default generic description against which to
measure deviations that rely on their relations to this default to make sense as
novels.
The editors of The Encyclopedia of the Novel further point to the difficulties of
scope that emerge when moving beyond the traditional focus on eighteenth-
century European fiction as the point of origin. And clearly the problem of
generic definition becomes more acute when attending to the history of the
form. We are happy today to call all sorts of works — from magic realism to
science fiction — novels, yet in determining the origins of the genre, scholars
have persistently linked it to the form of realism, not least because eighteenth-
century writers themselves sought to distinguish their new species of writ-
ing on the grounds of its probability. There is no doubt that extended
fictional prose narratives have been written since antiquity. The question
remains whether every work that fits this very broad definition ought to be
called a novel or whether the term is best restricted to a tradition beginning
in eighteenth-century Europe. Part of the problem here is a terminological
conflation in which the novel has become synonymous with fiction. At
stake in how we tell the story of “the novel” — say, in evolutionary terms
established by Franco Moretti in his edited collection The Novel, with its frame
of polygenetic classical origins leading to a “European acceleration” or in
more qualitative terms that emphasize the historical discontinuity of fictional
genres — is our definition of the novel itself.
The object of study for narrative theory is impossibly broad, given Roland
Barthes’s (1977 [1966]: 79) famous pronouncements in “Introduction to the
Structural Analysis of Narrative” that “the narratives of the world are num-
berless” and “narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is
6 Poetics Today 39:1

simply there, like life itself.” However, partly as a result of the methodological
choice to employ linguistics as the model for developing a grammar of nar-
rative, Barthes and other structuralists, such as Tzvetan Todorov and Gérard
Genette, tended to favor narrative fiction as the exemplary form on which to
base their observations and findings. Recent developments in narrative the-
ory, drawing upon sociolinguistics in the Labovian tradition, successive gen-
erations of cognitive psychology, antipositivist methods of narrative analysis
in the social sciences, and interrogations of the process of narrativization in

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historiography along with more extended studies of other media, such as film
and comics, have facilitated the original transmedial and interdisciplinary
aspirations of structuralism.
In his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Narrative David Herman
(2007: 5) argues that structuralism “helped initiate the narrative turn, uncou-
pling theories of narrative from theories of the novel, and shifting scholarly
attention from a particular genre of literary writing to all discourse (or, in
an even wider interpretation, all semiotic activities) that can be construed as
narratively organized.” Not until its “postclassical” phase, though, he argues,
did the larger aspirations of narratology come to be fully pursued and devel-
oped. Herman offers this history as a reason the volume he has edited is a
companion to narrative rather than to the novel. He defines narrative as “a
basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change,
a strategy that contrasts with, but is in no way inferior to, ‘scientific’ modes of
explanation that characterize phenomena as instances of general covering
laws” (ibid.: 3). This definition stems from cognitive psychology and chimes
with Lyotard’s account of the postmodern condition. It also echoes Jameson’s
(1981: 13) claim for narrative as “the central function or instance of the human
mind.” It is a far cry from Gerald Prince’s (1980: 49) early definition (in a
1980 special issue of Poetics Today on narratology) of narrative as “the rep-
resentation of real and fictive events in a time sequence.” While not being
limited to the novel, Prince’s definition emphasizes a formalist understanding
of the artifactual nature of narrative which could be the basis for a poetics of
fiction, whereas Herman’s definition exemplifies the more ambitious scope of
the cognitive revolution in the humanities and the aspirations of narratology
to marshal the interdisciplinary force of the narrative turn. Not all postclas-
sical developments have directly contributed to new understandings of the
novel, and neither have they been designed to. However, cognitive narratol-
ogy has been highly influential, from Monika Fludernik’s location of the
history of the novel in the cognitive frames of narrativization derived from
oral conversational storytelling to work on theory of mind by scholars such as
Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine.
 Dawson † Introduction 7

A key tradition of novel studies has been the post-Jamesian Anglo-Ameri-

can study of novelistic method, from Percy Lubbock’s Craft of Fiction (1921) to
Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), itself a vital contribution to narrative
theory for introducing the concepts of the unreliable narrator and the implied
author, as well as providing a link between the Chicago school of rhetoric and
the rhetorical approach to narrative developed by James Phelan. Structur-
alist narratology built on some of the insights provided by this tradition, with
Genette’s Narrative Discourse explicitly engaging with both Booth and Lub-

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bock, for instance. Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse introduced Ge-
nette’s theories to an English-speaking readership in 1978, followed by the
translation of Genette’s book in 1980.
The other key tradition in novel studies, however, has been that of the
history of the genre, most importantly with Watt’s Rise of the Novel in 1957.
Histories of prose fiction up until this point tended to be catholic in their
scope and descriptive in their intent, indicated by the title of John Dunlop’s
History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction,
from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age (1815). Watt intro-
duced a more sociological (the rise of the middle-class reading public) and
philosophical (the emergence of realist philosophy) perspective and, of course,
encouraged a restriction of the novel to the emergence of “formal realism”
in eighteenth-century England. As interest in poetics became less urgent than
cultural and political concerns in the 1980s, novel studies became deeply
invested in revising and critiquing Watt’s cultural history, with important
work by scholars such as McKeon, Armstrong, Catherine Gallagher, and
Srinivas Aramavudan. Given the formalist and largely synchronic approach
of narratology, it became less relevant to novel studies, which sought to
situate the novel in relation to the emergence of modernity, the rise of cap-
italism and modern bourgeois subjectivity, and the development of nation-
hood. At the same time, however, narratology itself began to respond to the
broader critical climate, with feminist narratology in particular offering a
model for later contextual and cultural approaches.
What narratology has tended to lack until recently is a historical dimension
or, more precisely, a historiographic orientation to its method in which vari-
ous formal features are understood as historically contingent practices rather
than reified linguistic structures or universal cognitive processes and in which
these features are studied through time. This is the contribution narratology
stands to make. Susan Lanser’s Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative
Voice (1992) remains the model for tracing the link between narrative voice
and social authority from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Recent
work in “unnatural narratology,” such as Brian Richardson’s (2015) history
of antimimetic narratives and Jan Alber’s (2016) diachronic account of
8 Poetics Today 39:1

“impossible” narratives, locate the novel in a larger historical dynamic where-

by new forms emerge from the introduction of unnatural elements that later
become conventionalized. From the perspective of novel studies, what this
work currently lacks is a sustained investigation of the sociohistorical con-
ditions that might accompany these dialectical shifts, as well as a study of their
contemporaneous reception.

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3. Topics of Convergence

Given the disciplinary and theoretical relationship between novel studies and
narrative theory that I have sketched out, it remains to consider the current
areas of debate in both fields that could profit from a more overt exchange of
ideas and to outline how the contributions in this special issue seek to establish
or further these exchanges.

3.1. Fictionality
The relationship between narrativity and fictionality has been a source of
much debate in narrative theory, including whether certain formal features
are exclusive to the genre of fiction. Gallagher (1994: xvii) has been instru-
mental in reconfiguring novelistic history around the question of fictionality,
claiming that realism must be understood as “fiction’s formal sign” and that
the genre of the novel was made possible by the emergence of a discourse of
fictionality in eighteenth-century England. Gallagher’s (2006: 337) assertion
that there is “mounting historical evidence” for the proposition that “the
novel discovered fiction” has the effect of reinforcing the traditional equation
of the novel with English realist fiction. While recognizing the prior existence
of fiction that did not intend to deceive, Gallagher argues that what dis-
tinguishes “novelistic fictionality” is its use of plausible rather than incredible
stories that also proclaim their distinction from fact. For Gallagher, this is
the product of a conceptual category of fiction that did not exist prior to the
eighteenth century and that can only retrospectively be applied to earlier
forms. Gallagher’s thesis invites us to ask whether realist fiction ought to
be considered the theoretical exemplar of the category of fictionality and
whether novel studies ought to engage with scholarship on fictionality in
earlier periods. For instance, in medieval studies Walter Haug (1997) attrib-
uted the “discovery” of fictionality to Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian ro-
mance in the twelfth century, and this work has been refined by scholars such
as Fritz Peter Knapp (1996) and Dennis H. Green (2002).
Gallagher’s (2006: 341) argument for the historically distinct nature of the
novel is its use of fictional “nobodies,” characters with proper names that lack
embodied referents, constituting the “key mode of nonreferentiality” that is
 Dawson † Introduction 9

specific to the “overt fictionality” of the realist novel. One consequence of this
argument is to make relevant to novel studies the tradition in philosophy of
language that debates the ontological status of fictional entities. However,
Gallagher (ibid.: 337) speculates that one reason the vital feature of fictionality
has been neglected by scholars of the novel, beyond its apparently self-evident
nature, is that “perhaps we find that the theories of fictionality debated by
philosophers and narratologists finally tell us too little about either the history
or the specific properties of the novel to repay the difficulty of mastering

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them.” In seeking to articulate the affective force of fictional characters, she
dismisses the value of analytic philosophy and possible worlds theory, acknowl-
edges the importance of pragmatic speech act theory for drawing these tra-
ditions closer to formalist and stylistic concerns, and attends briefly to studies
of signposts of fictionality because they support her thesis of overt fictionality.
The question is whether Gallagher has too summarily dismissed the con-
tributions of earlier scholarship on fictionality in a quest to distinguish the
novel and whether a narratological approach to fictionality can contribute to
the history of novelistic form. Several articles in this issue take up this chal-
lenge by engaging explicitly with Gallagher’s work. Fludernik provides an
overview of competing traditions of scholarship on fictionality as a way of
addressing its historicity and ongoing debates over when this category
emerged as an alternative to truth or lying. She furthermore seeks to provide
theoretical clarity by stressing the distinction in the German tradition
between the fictive and the fictional and builds on earlier claims by scholars
such as McKeon (1987, 2005) and John Bender (1998) to argue for the rise of
factuality as a more plausible way to frame the emergence of the realist novel.
Phelan assesses the overlaps and divergences between Gallagher’s historical
account of the “rise of fictionality” and the emergent rhetorical approach to
fictionality. Taking up Gallagher’s theory of character, Phelan emphasizes
the double consciousness of readers who simultaneously occupy a narrative
audience and an authorial audience to demonstrate how novelistic fiction-
ality differs from rhetorical deployments of fictionality outside the genre. In
doing so he offers a competing, more pragmatic account of the function of
fictional nobodies. Simona Zetterberg Gjerlevsen uses the emergence of the
Danish novel in the eighteenth century as a test case for the wider applica-
bility of historical accounts of novelistic fictionality in England. As opposed
to fictional characters, however, her emphasis is on the rhetorical means by
which novelists sought to frame the truth status of their genre in prefatorial
statements and to distinguish their work from the earlier tradition of Volks-
bücher (popular books), in which fantastic stories were presented as fact.
10 Poetics Today 39:1

3.2. Surface Reading and Computational Narratology

In the same year that Novel: A Forum on Fiction published its special issue with
Armstrong’s editorial on how we read now, invoking Jameson’s dictum to
always historicize, Representations published a special issue on surface read-
ing in which the editors framed “the way we read now” as a generational
response to the practice of symptomatic reading popularized by Jameson
and articulated a number of alternative critical practices that attend to the
surfaces of texts rather than plumb their depths. Stephen Best and Sharon

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Marcus (2009: 11) include narratology alongside thematic criticism, genre
criticism, and discourse analysis as one type of reading which sees “surface
as the location of patterns that exist within and across texts.” For Best and
Marcus (ibid.), surface readers are anatomists breaking down texts into their
components or taxonomists arranging them into larger categories, both of
whom “locate narrative structures and abstract patterns on the surface, as
aggregates of what is manifest in multiple texts as cognitively latent but
semantically continuous with an individual text’s presented meaning.”
It is certainly the case that structuralist narratology positioned itself as an
antidote to the dominance of interpretative and evaluative criticism in liter-
ary studies, and in this sense it would be resistant to symptomatic reading.
However, postclassical narratology typically characterizes its difference by
emphasizing that it puts the narratological “toolbox” in the service of textual
analysis, including interpretative criticism of individual works. Ansgar Nün-
ning (2009: 63), for instance, claims that “any literary or cultural historian
who wants to address ethical, ideological, or political issues raised in or by
narratives can, therefore, profit from the application of the toolbox that
narratology provides.” The interpretative practices of thematic and genre
criticism could certainly profit from closer attention to form. Novel studies
tends to conceive of formalism on a large generic scale (the romance and the
novel, sentimental and gothic fiction, etc.), meaning that vital textual features
such as narrative voice are often neglected or given short shrift and categories
such as free indirect discourse (FID) are used in a loose descriptive sense,
devoid of the microstylistic attention that narratology affords and inattentive
to theoretical debates about these categories themselves. Having said this, I
suggest that rather than being understood in terms of its pragmatic export
value for delivering a tool kit of formalist categories for novel studies, narra-
tology could more productively function as a model for new modes of reading
that are wary of hermeneutics.
The most prominent and controversial mode of surface reading over the
past decade has been the quantitative approach that Moretti dubbed distant
reading — a polemical challenge to the dominance of close reading in literary
studies. Moretti’s achievement has in fact been to situate methods that have
 Dawson † Introduction 11

long informed narrative theory (Vladimir Propp’s morphology, corpus sty-

listics analysis, and computational narratology) in the context of the history
of the novel, world literature, and the digital humanities. Two articles in this
special issue demonstrate the value of computational investigations of nar-
ratological categories. Nicholas Paige provides evidence of the rapid emer-
gence and decline of first-person novels as a proportion of all novels published
in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. In particular, he analyzes the
proportion of memoir to epistolary “document” novels to argue against a

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symptomatic reading that would link these forms to the rise of bourgeois
individualism in favor of an artifactual approach to literary history informed
by technology studies. William Nelles and Linda Williams argue that, con-
trary to the opinion that the “natural” order of narrative is chronological, the
events of fictional narratives are typically relayed out of chronological order,
making this the default against which a strictly chronological narrative would
in fact be an aberration. They prove this by producing time maps of a
number of canonical first-person novels to chart the relation between the
order of events and the order of their narration, demonstrating that autobi-
ographical narratives share the same pattern of anachronies as achronologi-
cal memory narratives. These two articles are forms of surface reading that
employ quantitative analysis to challenge prevailing assumptions in novel
studies and narrative theory, respectively.

3.3. Diachronic Narratology and Novelistic History

In a keynote address, “History of the Novel, Theory of the Novel,” published
in the fortieth anniversary special issue of Novel, Moretti (2010: 3) campaigns
for a greater morphological depth to the theory of the novel, suggesting that
we ought to invert our focus on the history of complex style that emerged in
contrast to popular narrativity: “Taking the style of dime novels as the basic
object of study and explaining Henry James’s as an unlikely by-product:
that’s how a theory of prose should proceed because that’s how history has
proceeded. Not the other way around.” This claim for the primacy of raw
historical data informs the research questions that Moretti (ibid.) indicates
should be attached to new quantitative methods:
Looking at prose style from below: with digital databases, this is now easy to
imagine: a few years, and we’ll be able to search just about all novels that have
ever been published and look for patterns among billions of sentences. Personally,
I am fascinated by this encounter of the formal and the quantitative. Let me give
an example: we all analyze stylistic structures — free indirect style, stream of con-
sciousness, melodramatic excess, whatever. But it’s striking how little we actually
know about the genesis of these forms. Once they’re there, we know what to do;
but how did they get there in the first place?
12 Poetics Today 39:1

This passage articulates a research program that would be recognizable to

any scholar in narrative theory. Narratology is characterized precisely by an
encounter of the formal and the quantitative. When faced with the limitless
number of narratives that comprise its object of study, structuralist narratol-
ogists, such as Barthes and Todorov, proceeded from the scientific method of
deduction. The aim was not to describe all existing narratives but to provide a
logically coherent theory that would hold true for all possible narratives. The
criticism of this approach concerns the limitations of a corpus from which an

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initial hypothesis is derived (say, modern canonical novels). The empirical
promise of big data offers the opportunity to verify or revise these hypotheses,
but at the same time it cannot supply the explanatory power of a theoretical
model. In her defense of the continued “interest and utility of close reading,”
Barbara Herrnstein Smith (2016: 73) contends, first, that faith in the objective
results of data relies on an outmoded understanding of scientific objectivity
and, second, that the tagging of small textual units required by distant read-
ing involves the same attention to microfeatures that characterizes close
reading. To this we could add that if we are to search for patterns among
billions of sentences, we require a rigorous grammatical understanding of the
textual unit we are looking for while retaining a theory of that unit flexible
enough to respond to its shifting functions and formal properties.
A search for the genesis of stylistic structures, particularly the prenovelistic
origins of FID, informs much contemporary research in narrative theory,
with one instance being Herman’s edited collection The Emergence of Mind
(2011). Fludernik anticipated Moretti’s call for this kind of inquiry in “The
Diachronization of Narratology” (2003), where she argues that, despite the
proliferation of new narratological approaches, theoretical interest in “the
history of narrative forms and functions” (ibid.: 331) remains minimal. For
Fludernik (ibid.: 332), however, two critical developments have fostered the
need for greater attention to diachrony: “the study of narrative outside the
genre of the novel, especially the comparison of literary and historical texts,
and, secondly, the research into the origins of the novel. The two areas are
associated, most prominently, with the work of Hayden White on the one
hand and that of Michael McKeon (besides Paul J. Hunter, Lennard J. Davis,
and Barbara Foley) on the other.”
McKeon himself has recently launched a scathing attack on the limitations
of narratology, an attack which can be taken to exemplify the position of
novel studies. McKeon (2017: 41) argues that universalizing assumptions
about narrative remain spurious, because “the abstract theory of the narra-
tive mode is largely drawn from the concrete practice of the novel genre,”
in particular the modern novel. Hence narratology offers a transhistorical
universalizing principle of narrative derived from a localized generic prac-
 Dawson † Introduction 13

tice while simultaneously neglecting the historical specificity of that genre.

McKeon’s critique stems from an assessment of structuralist narratology
and particularly Genette’s work. These criticisms are valid, but to dismiss
narratology on these grounds is akin to dismissing novel studies on the basis of
Watt’s shortcomings. McKeon himself seems to offer a general definition of
the novel adduced from its eighteenth-century manifestation, perpetuating
the conflation of realism and the novel by claiming that the genre is defined
by a self-reflexive awareness of its own mimetic enterprise. He goes on to

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argue that even in the postclassical phase of narratology, “the great majority
of texts analyzed and adduced as exemplary narratives continue to be novels,
hence representative of only the most modern genre of that mode” (ibid.: 70).
This may or may not be true quantitatively, but given the development of
transmedial theories and the attention paid to factuality, it would be a stretch
to say that the novel remains the standard by which narrative is measured.
Of course, McKeon’s main concern is to read the problems of narratology
through the discipline of novel studies, and this leads him to suggest that the
principles and assumptions of narratology are susceptible to a challenge from
the evidence of eighteenth-century fiction. The category of FID receives par-
ticular attention in McKeon’s critique, where he suggests that a restricted
focus on its grammatical properties cannot attend to its “generic and histori-
cal specificity” (ibid.: 72) or the “larger intellectual and cultural movements”
that have enabled it to develop (ibid.: 68). According to McKeon (ibid.), “FID
challenges the separation of narrator from character” that underpins the
discrete typologies of thought representation in narrative theory, but in
explaining its historical development he argues that in the eighteenth century
“the separation of narrator from character became an explicit protocol of
characterization and interpretation” that made their conflation possible. The
important point here is that historical investigation cannot be separated from
theoretical construction. We cannot trace the history of FID without having a
theory of what constitutes FID while at the same time remaining open to that
theory being modified by its history.
In this issue Maria Mäkelä addresses the diachronic study of FID by both
attending to its early manifestation in Madame de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves
and arguing that a theory of thought representation (and hence a theory of
character) based on a schematic model rather than a fidelity model is best
suited for analyzing early modern fiction in which subjectivity is experienced
and understood in terms of a collective sense of shared and typical emotions.
She sets out to demonstrate that the individuated consciousness of fictional
minds in the modern novel emerged out of a conventional tension between
the exceptionality of characterological experience and the exemplarity of
emotional responses in early modern fiction.
14 Poetics Today 39:1

3.4. Political Criticism and New Technologies

If narratology has been concerned with the relation between story (the events
of a narrative) and discourse (the manner in which those events are relayed),
novel studies tends to place critical emphasis on the relation between the story
and the extraliterary context in which the material text of the discourse
circulates. The perennial challenge of both enterprises is how to reconcile
these relationships without being reductive. At stake here is how to make “the
way we read now” meaningful, and this requires an attention to the mediat-

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ing force of literary form (between the world it engages with and the fictional
world it invokes), a force that is necessarily political. In this issue Daniel
Hartley seeks to develop the tradition of social formalism by showing how
typically Marxist political criticism can be united with narratology. In this
context he offers style as the concept around which a critical poetics can be
constructed. Hartley proceeds to elaborate a large-scale relationship between
the social and the linguistic aspects of style operating at the different levels of
linguistic situation, experience, and stylistic ideology.
If the novel is a genre enabled by the technology of print, the final two
essays address how the contemporary novel has been shaped by new tech-
nologies. Prefaces to eighteenth-century novels offer vital paratextual evi-
dence for how novelists sought to frame the reception of their work. Virginia
Pignagnoli assesses the emergent poetics of the post-postmodern novel in
relation to the new environment of digital paratexts and how this has enabled
novelists to frame their work in relation to the new sincerity. If, as many
scholars have argued, the rise of the novel facilitated the discursive construc-
tion of the modern subject as an individual, one wonders whether, in the age
of the “death of the novel,” we could make similar claims about both the
nature of subjectivity and the power of the novel. In this issue Marta Figler-
owicz argues that the promise of “total recall” of our memories enabled by
social media and new digital technology has changed our relation to our sense
of self and that this relation is being explored in contemporary fiction. Fig-
lerowicz argues that the autofictional works of Ben Lerner and Karl Ove
Knausgaard exemplify this trend and proceeds to examine how the accumu-
lation of permanently retrievable data about the minutiae of one’s life par-
adoxically works against the individualization of the self.
Taken together, the essays in this collection cover the period from the much
debated “rise” of the modern novel to the post-postmodern era in the wake
of the much exaggerated “death” of the novel. They also demonstrate the
need for continued reflection on the methods for studying the history of this
narrative form and the theoretical assumptions that inform these methods.
 Dawson † Introduction 15

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