Chapter 1, “Order and Origin,” begins by asking what we mean when we speak of the “modern novel.” Frequently its origins are traced to Gustave Flaubert, but this assumption deserves more scrutiny than it receives. What was preoccupying Flaubert in the months (indeed the very minutes) when he was formulating his beliefs about the novel, the pronouncements that would go on to become articles of faith for Joyce and other modern novelists? He was terrified that he had fathered a child, and he wrote in great detail about his aversion to the idea of creating new life. This chapter argues that this was not an idle distaste. It was, in fact, evidence of a sensibility (astringent, subtractive, devoted to an ideal of order) that undergirds the very idea of the modern novel that Flaubert inaugurated. This chapter provides close study of the procreative morality of Madame Bovary, L’Éducation sentimentale, and Bouvard et Pécuchet to demonstrate how such books, and such attitudes toward the problem of giving life, determined the course of the modern novel.

The third chapter analyses Forster’s transformation of the opera-box literary trope of seduction into a riotous opera scene in his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread. Describing a performance of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammemoor, the scene is liberally scattered with allusions to nineteenth-century literary texts (such as Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Scott's Bride of Lammermoor) and to national stereotypes about musical idiosyncrasies (such as those described in Baedeker's guidebook and in Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad). Arguing that Forster’s parodic use of these allusions reflects both his negotiation of the weightiness of literary heritage and his participation in topical debates about national character, the chapter considers his stylistic and ideological ambitions for his debut novel. The chapter brings together considerations of the novel’s literary history and its national politics. Unearthing what lies beneath the beguiling social comedy of the novel, the chapter puts its emphasis on the intertextual and contextual resonances of the opera scene, analysing them as evidence of Forster’s strategy of writing against existing material to distinguish his debut work from others.