The Origins of the English Novel by Michael McKeon

After a very anxious introduction justifying a dialectic approach to the history of the novel, added for this new edition, this book begins with Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel. Although McKeon finds Watt's argument (that the novel, identified by its use of formal realism) relatively persuasive, he contends that Henry Fielding's texts work against this argument: these works owe more to romance than to formal realism. In response, McKeon takes a new perspective. He claims that the novel rises out of the culture trying to work out its relationship to the categories of truth and virtue. He identifies a dialectical process with a double reverse (that is, romance, then empiricism, and then skepticism), and, in the first half of his book, shows how this framework applies to the question of truth (addressing 18th century concerns about fiction and genre) and to the question of virtue (ought a novel to provide moral instruction). Then, in the second half of the book, McKeon gives readings of Don Quixote, Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Pamela, and Joseph Andrews, fitting these works into the framework he established in the first half. There's a lot in here about the relationship of the novel to romance, and McKeon tends, in the first half, to start very early (with Classical literature) and give a rapid and spotty overview until he reaches the 17th century. I found his reading of Robinson Crusoe very persuasive.