Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In 1908, Martha Pike Conant commented that: “Historians of English fiction have insufficiently recognized the fact that the oriental tale was one of the forms of literature that gave to the reading public in Augustan England the element of plot which, to a certain extent, supplemented that of character.” Subsequent histories remained, despite Conant's intervention, wedded to the exploration of the “Englishness” of the novel in Britain. While the influence of a small number of French and Spanish fictions (Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne {1731–42}, Cervantes's Don Quixote {1605}) is acknowledged, the novel continues to be cast as an expression of national identity, especially the increasing dominance of empirical philosophy and mercantile values within the national culture. Ethnocentric accounts of the rise of the novel in England have seen it as a product of indigenous traditions (in news reporting, ballads, history writing) or at best an imitation of other European traditions (the Spanish/ Italian novella or the French romances and nouvelles). An honorable exception is found in the work of Margaret Anne Doody who argues for the importance of Greek and Roman classical fictions in shaping the modern novel in her True Story of the Novel (1998); she complains that “A certain chauvinism leads English-speaking critics to treat the Novel as if it were somehow essentially English, and as ... log in or subscribe to read full text