Historians of the novel typically use examples — a few mostly canonical works — to establish their desired narrative. The problem is that these chosen novels function less as true examples — representatives of a class of objects — than as signs of the invisible process (conceptual or socio-subjective) that is the coming of Modernity. This study approaches the novel’s history, and specifically the oft-debated question of its developing fictionality, by using samples of French novels from 1601 to 1830. This quantitative approach reveals that though the novel can indeed be said to “fictionalize” over the course of the eighteenth century, the customary explanations for the evolution are not supported by the record. I propose of that the novel is not one thing that modernizes, but in fact an ever-changing system of artifacts that should be understood through models provided by studies of technological innovation. Novelistic artifacts are invented, they evolve and spread, and they eventually fall into disuse, all in accordance with the values of their human inventors, and the constraints placed on the latter by the extant artifacts available for modification.

Etudes britanniques contemporaines, 2020

The recently-established Goldsmiths Prize, rewards ‘creative daring [and] fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form’. The prize’s existence suggests a resurgence in the interest in questions of formal novelty, the prestige of which has historically fluctuated in the U.K. Several recently shortlisted novels have broached the topic of contemporary communications technologies and their relationship to narrative and self-definition, while deploying stylistic devices which encourage readers to associate formal experimentation with these themes. In a societal context in which human individuality is seemingly being undermined by technology, it seems pertinent to investigate the ways in which the ‘experimental’ novel can represent character and thought while possibly providing answers to the question of their potentially frightening uniformization.

British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830, edited by Kristin Girten and Aaron Hanlon, 2023

1982

The development of English prose contributed to the rise of novel during the eighteenth century. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year and Roxana are the forerunners of novel. His fictional works are called -fictional biographies.ǁ‖ The entire gamut of his fictional work is biographical and he made no attempt towards the organization of material into a systematic plot. However, his fictional works are distinguished by -the extraordinary realism which is an important element in the art of novel writing. His stories are told so convincingly as if they were stories of real life. He also knew the art of narrating details effectively. He had a swift and resolute narrative method and a plain and matter-of-fact style. To the development of novel Defoe's contribution is remarkable. His fictional works -form the transition from the slight tale and the romance of the Elizabethan time to the finished novel of Richardson and Fielding.ǁ‖ Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which satirises the manners and politics of contemporary England and Europe, is written in powerful and convincing prose. It also contributed to the evolution of English novel. The famous periodical The Spectator is a forerunner of English novel. It contains all the elements of social novel, except a harmonious plot. The material for the novels of manners or social comedy is found in The Coverley Papers. It contains vivid and realistic presentation of contemporary society, well delineated characters, rich fund of humour and pathos and a clear, lucid style. Edward Albert remarks: -if Addison had pinned the Coverley Papers together with a stronger plot, if insisted on only referring to the widow who had stolen the knight's affections, he had introduced some important female characters, we should have had the first regular novel in 76 our tongue. As it is, this essay series bring us within measurable distance of the genuine eighteenth century novel.ǁ‖

2015

Literary theorists have always been in search of new ways of expression and new experiments, so much so with reference to the modern novel like, for instance James Joyce 's Ulysses , Dubliners , or Portrait of the Artist . Generally, modern writers made use of theoretical notes or marginal ia in order to approve or disapprove of certain terms and ideologies, and to set forth their distinct aesthetic philosophy well into the 20th century. The fact that modern writers such as Joyce were in a constant process of changing perspectives and denouncing Realism 's infatua- tion with objectivity can be traced back to their common habit of leaving behind works unfin- ished just to have a glance into the newly launched technologies on the market, and to put to the test the functionality of subjectivism through the stimuli mediated by scientific discoveries such as waves communication, atonality or techniques similar to the stored-program architec- ture. The question remains for us, and...

Recherches Sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry

The focus of this paper is on the novel in book form and on the influence and impact of the new media and their technologies, both as hardware and software, including the Internet and varied web content — web pages, online magazines, blogs, chat rooms, forums, social networks and media — as well as mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets and therefore text messaging (SMS) and instant messenger services. Three main questions guide this paper. Have the Internet, the new media and digital devices altered the way authors conceive, design and weave together their narratives in books? How is the interaction or mutual relation between various old and new media (art, cartoons, cinema, and TV included) achieved within the codex book? Do authors expunge or expose the phenomenon of media merging and interaction? By analysing works by five writers - British, Canadian and American - Matt Beaumont and Jeanette Winterson, Douglas Coupland, Mark Z. Danielewski and Jennifer Egan - this paper looks at the codex form as one medium among others, and as a diagrammatic, phenomenal and performative space (see Drucker 2007) rather than a representative/figurative space, and as an ur-coding practice now existing among newer ones.

This paper sketches three different ways that contemporary writers of literary fiction locate a sense, not of the religious, but of the sublime in the technologies discussed in their twenty-first century texts. Jeanette Winterson‘s The PowerBook (2000), Zadie Smith‘s The Autograph Man (2002), and Gail Jones‘s Dreams of Speaking (2006) include references to computers and other forms of information technology, and incorporate elements of the sublime or references to the divine connected in some way with those technologies.

Poetics Today, 2018

When literary scholars analyze narrative personhood historically, they typically see periods, explained as an effect of deeper psychosocial mutations. Thus the dominant first person of the eighteenth century is the counterpart to a new bourgeois subject, while the third-person omniscience of the nineteenth might reflect an age of increasing state control. The article argues that only our impressionistic use of mostly canonical examples permits such sweeping statements and that the very notion of the period (never mind episteme or paradigm) is undermined by a quantitative examination of the literary archive and its evolution. Based on a systematic sample of French novels over twenty-three decades, this study concludes that narrative forms such as the memoir novel and the epistolary novel behave as successful artifacts. As they spread, they achieve a recognizable form that peaks at a certain point, after which use steadily declines. Because the novel as a whole is composed of multiple forms in constant flux, it becomes impossible to isolate periods of homogeneous practice that could be said to operate according to some deeper sociocultural logic.

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1984