Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Extract

Histories of the novel—accounts that trace, variously, fiction's beginnings, progress, rise, and setbacks, that nominate particular candidates for the title of “the first novelist,” or that identify these pioneers’ most important or representative successors-began to be written in England, France, and China in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A boom in the authoring, reading, and marketing of fiction was then commencing both in Western Europe and East Asia, and histories of the novel, I will suggest, often serve to manage and police such booms. These histories increased in number and were harnessed to new sociopolitical ends after the nineteenth century. That was when the novel became, with history-writing itself, one “sign of the modern,” and when every nation-state that aspired to participate in the world literary system was pressured to display evidence of a well-rooted tradition of narrative fiction (N. B. Dirks, 1990, “History as a Sign of the Modern,” Public Culture 2:25–32). The histories did not only assist in the canonization of particular works of fiction—though the earliest, like Pierre-Daniel Huet's 1670–71 Traité de l'origine des romans (Treatise on the Origins of Novel/The History of Romance) or Feng Menglong's 1620 survey of the lineage of Chinese fiction, first appeared as prefaces that vouched for newly written texts, Madame de Lafayette's Zayde ... log in or subscribe to read full text