Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel [Hardcover]

This book considers why narrative realism in literature is seen as a 'full account' of 'real life' and the individual self. Unconventionally, Carnell shows 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.Introduction: Realism and the Rise of the Novel Political Discourse and the Abstract Individual Proto-Novelistic Propaganda 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

'This book considers how the narrative and formal conventions that have come to be known as 'narrative realism' or formal realism are, in fact, implicitly and strategically political in their initial deployment. The study reminds us that both formal analysis and political readings should not only be re-introduced to the consideration of the novel, but can also be read as mutually informing. As Carnell effectively articulates, we now naturalize a split between the political and the literary which would not have existed for an eighteenth century reader. Indeed, eighteenth century political discourse, in a period without our mania for generic classifications, could have been active in shaping notions of human characteristics or 'realism' - as active, argues Carnell, as the novel itself. This is a very thoughtful and cogently argued study that brings new perspectives and insights to canonical and also much less well-known fictional texts of the period.' - Catherine Ingrassia, Professor of English, Virginia Commonwealth University

Partisan Politics allows us to read for the first time former political hacks turned novelists, such as Fielding and Defoe, with regard to their earlier work. No longer are they to be undersl“7