Spanish Speculations on the Rise of the English Novel

Few books have had such a pervasive and permanent influence on any field of English studies as Ian Watt’s 1957 monograph The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Apart from coining the universally accepted phrase to designate the appearance of that new form of prose narrative in eighteenth-century Britain, Watt made current an explanation of it which soon became the explanation. This was based on a combination of literary, socio-economic and ideological reasons: the spread of formal realism, anchored in philosophical empiricism and formal because it ‘does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it’1; the expansion of the reading market, as a result of wider and easier access to books; and the emergence of middle-class individualism, the conjunction of capitalism and Protestantism giving shape to the bourgeois ethos. According to Watt, the novel provided a realistic representation of modern experience catering for an enlarged, mainly middle-class reading public and promoting their worldview; in other words, the novel gave expression to the modernity that made it possible by changes in epistemology, material conditions and ideology. In so doing, Watt combined a formalist or intrinsic and a materialistic or extrinsic approach to present the rise of the novel as an exclusively British affair, dismissing any foreign influences or intervention. As a matter of fact, he excluded those who he may have felt were the most serious contenders to the claim of priority in what we could call the race for the rise because they did not fit into his prescription of formal realism or into his alignment of the new genre with modernity: Cervantes and the

Art · Literature · Romance · Early Modern Spanish Literature · History

• The quixotic eighteenth century

  Open Access•Amelia Dale•Literature Compass•2022

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