Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century Fiction by J. Paul Hunter

I found Paul Hunter's Before Novels a helpful approach to understanding the coming of the novel to English literature during the 18th century. In this book's first and shortest section Hunter begins by justifying discussing the beginning of the novel at all (while "novelistic" elements have existed as long as literature, the novel represents a specific conjunction of them), strongly argues against the idea (often associated with followers of Northrop Frye) that the novel develops out of romance, and challenges Ian Watt's thesis of the immediate "triple rise"of the novel (rise of middle class leads to rise of literacy leads to rise of novel). The second part of this section identifies elements of the novel that seem counter-intuitive but were quite present in the eighteenth century that reflect the contexts and pretexts of the novel. In Hunter's second section, he makes the case that the rapid growth in the literate population occured two or three generations before the novel developed. He identifies several new needs in this population's reading materials (looking forward in time, awareness of place, and a loss of traditional oral culture [especially fairy tales]). In his third, and major, section Hunter identifies several types of writing that met the needs of this population before the novel developed, and thus were predecessors of a sort to the novel: newspapers and journalism, didactic tracts (especially guides), diaries, autobiographies, and histories.

Overall, I found Hunter's arguments persuasive. His arguments about the novels themselves make sense to me as a sometime reader of such novels, although I am less familiar with the extraliterary texts that form the basis of his analysis in the bulk of the book. He is quite candid about the difficulties in calculating literacy rates during this entire period, but his arguments make some sense, especially insofar as they do note require the novel to develop immediately in response to a rapid change.