Introduction

Summary

The introduction begins with a methodological critique of conventional “rise of the novel” narratives, in which individual, carefully chosen texts are taken as symptoms of underlying changes summed up by the word modernity. The potential benefits of quantitative sampling are then described and situated with respect to the computational text analysis more common in the Digital Humanities. Quantitative study reveals trends that can best be understood through an approach adapted from Science and Technology Studies, where new artifacts are the result of an interplay between human values and the material constraints placed on human actors by extant artifacts. The basic problem of the novel’s so-called fictionalization over the course of the eighteenth century is then shown to be bound up with subject matter (notably the use of “nobody” protagonists) and more properly formal issues (involving especially first-person narratives).