Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel

This book considers why narrative realism in literature has long been understood as a "full account" of "real life" and the individual self. Breaking with this tradition, Carnell demonstrates that the formal conventions of narrative realism emerged in the seventeenth century in response to an explosion of partisan writings that put into play competing versions of political selfhood.

Rachel Carnell is Associate Professor of English at Cleveland State University. She is co-editor (with Ruth Herman) of the five-volume Selected Works of Delarivier Manley (2005), and her articles have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Studies in the Novel.

Introduction: Realism and the Rise of the Novel * Poltical Discourse and the Abstract Individual * Proto-Novelistic Propoganda and Narrative Realism * Tory Ideology and Aphra Behn's Turn to the Novel * Daniel Defoe and the Whig Ideal of Selfhood * Character and Politics in Samuel Richardson's Fiction * Jacobite Ideology and Eliza Haywood's Response to Whig Realism * Nature, Systems, and the Individual Introduction: Realism and the Rise of the Novel * Poltical Discourse and the Abstract Individual * Proto-Novelistic Propoganda and Narrative Realism * Tory Ideology and Aphra Behn's Turn to the Novel * Daniel Defoe and the Whig Ideal of Selfhood * Character and Politics in Samuel Richardson's Fiction * Jacobite Ideology and Eliza Haywood's Response to Whig Realism * Nature, Systems, and the Individual