Part III - History and nation

Summary

Introduction

The two chapters of this final part consider novels focused on particular historical events, either completed or ongoing. Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), often regarded as the originating point of nineteenth-century fiction, will serve here as the terminus for a discussion of three overlapping areas of interest for eighteenth-century fiction: large-scale historical change, smaller-scale sectarian politics, and the representational authority of the narratives that convey these intersections of fact and invention to readers. Throughout the eighteenth century, the traffic between history and novel writing ran in both directions, in part because genre revisions in the period kept pace with larger cultural developments. As we have seen in previous chapters, classical history writing was itself challenged by the conjectural and philosophical forms identified with the Scottish Enlightenment writers, David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar, all authors alert to readers’ increasing attention to inwardness, character motivation, and the complex connections between public event and private experience. History’s importance to fiction, in turn, appears most obviously in the novel’s reflex attempts to appropriate the prestige of the well-established and hence more commanding genre. The means chosen to claim parity between established and emergent genres are various. They include using a flatly descriptive style to replicate notionally eye-witness reportage of a devastating event, as in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722); assigning titles such as The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (or more slyly given the difficulties of constructing a complete narrative for an abandoned infant, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling); and making references to specific historical moments that counterpoint external political event and negotiations of power within the novel. Through these strategies, contemporary novels enlist history in aid of their own attempts to puzzle out the social, political, national, and even global forces that shape individual and collective identities.