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In Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder (2014), Sarah Tindal Kareem offers an important challenge to the story that Ian Watt influentially tells in The Rise of the Novel (1957) about the relationship between eighteenth-century fiction and wonder. Against Watt’s insistence that the development of the novel was premised on a renunciation of the wonders of romance which went hand in hand with the project of Enlightenment science and its rejection of miracles and the supernatural, Kareem argues that the authors of eighteenth-century prose fiction reinvented rather than renounced wonder. In her view, “[w]hile supernatural objects of wonder are certainly viewed more skeptically during this period, the result is not that wonder loses its hold on people, but rather that wonder’s objects shift.”[1] By this account, practitioners of an emergent fictional “realism” sought to create the effect of wonder by employing new strategies of defamiliarization, including some borrowed from science. Yet eighteenth-century literary criticism reveals an already divided sense of the novel’s relationship to the wonders of romance. In his well-known essay on fiction published in The Rambler No. 4 (31 March 1750), Samuel Johnson states that the “comedy of romance” (his designation for the novel), unlike romance, must “bring about natural events by easy means” and “keep up curiosity without the help of wonder.”[2] He elsewhere associates wonder, as Kareem notes, with the temporary suspension of the cognitive process, a conception of wonder evident in a line of Enlightenment thinkers that included Joseph Addison, Adam Smith, and Henry Home, Lord Kames.[3] In distancing the novel from the wonders of romance, Johnson fortifies a distinction made by William Congreve close to sixty years before in the preface to his literary work Incognita (1692), where the latter pronounces that “Romances give more of Wonder, Novels more Delight.”[4] However, the conception of the relationship between wonder and the novel advanced by Anna Letitia Barbauld (née Aikin; 1743–1825), who edited the landmark fifty-volume series The British Novelists that was published in 1810, is significantly different from Johnson’s. While maintaining continuities with Johnson in distinguishing between romances and novels, Barbauld regards the line of separation between the two as far less clear-cut and conveys a sharply contrasting view of the place of wonder within the overall history of fiction.[5] In the process, she makes a case for women’s continuing special claims as readers and writers of fiction based in part on their greater receptivity to emotions such as that of wonder, thus challenging Johnson’s implicit positioning of men as the leaders of a developing form of literary realism that required a broad knowledge of nature and society.

Among the continuities with Johnson and other eighteenth-century critics is Barbauld’s acceptance of literary realism as a defining feature of the novel against romance.[6] In the prefatory essay she composed for The British Novelists, titled “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing,” Barbauld traces the origin of the novel to ancient “stories taken from, or imitating, real life” and speculates that in the passage from “[r]ude” to “polished times” an increasingly “closer imitation of nature began to be called for.”[7] In her view, it was at least in part the growing interest and investment in realism that gradually changed the character of prose fiction. In another essay that she mined for The British Novelists series, “Life of Samuel Richardson, with Remarks on his Writings,” originally prefixed to her 1804 edition of Samuel Richardson’s correspondence, Barbauld explains that as knowledge increased and superstition lessened, there was growing conviction that “le vrai seul est aimable” [the true alone is amiable]—a quotation that she borrows from French literary critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux.[8] As perhaps Barbauld remembered, the original quotation, which appears in the 1675 poem “Epître IX. Au marquis de Seignelay” preceded by “Rien n’est beau que le vrai,” is applied by Boileau directly to fiction.[9] According to Barbauld, it was this belief in the importance of an appearance of truth that eventually compelled a more plausible action and “characters moving in the same sphere of life with ourselves, and brought into action by incidents of daily occurrence.”[10] As she chronicles, the earliest fictions in modern Europe were the chivalric romances, which focused on the frequently wonderful adventures of knights and ladies. Next came the historical romances, with “personages … removed from common life, and taken from ancient history; but without the least resemblance to the heroes whose names they bore” and “adventures” that “were marvellous, but not impossible.”[11] Barbauld attributes the demise of the historical romances to Boileau, who, she notes, “ridiculed these, as [Miguel de] Cervantes had done the others, and their knell was rung,” so that “people were ready to wonder they had ever admired them.”[12] She appears to refer here to Boileau’s attack against historical romances in Dialogue sur les héros de roman, composed in 1664 and first published in 1713. Boileau’s objections to historical romances are notably somewhat different from those made against chivalric romances in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the first part of which was published in 1605, the second in 1615. Essentially, Boileau accuses the writers of historical romances of sullying the reputation of ancient classical heroes such as Alexander the Great by giving their names to effeminate fictional counterparts. Among the other fictions Barbauld briefly mentions as flourishing during this period are “the monkish legends,” which she describes as “a species of romance abounding with the marvellous, and particularly suited to the taste of a superstitious age.”[13] There are a few singular works she cites as well, including Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (c. 1585), which she characterizes as a “romance … of the pastoral heroic kind.”[14] Continuing her history of the novel, Barbauld reports that by the time of Richardson “[t]he moated castle is changed to a modern parlour; the princess and her pages to a lady and her domestics, or even to a simple maiden, without birth or fortune; we are not called on to wonder at improbable events, but to be moved by natural passions, and impressed by salutary maxims.”[15] Barbauld goes on to repeat Johnson’s commendation that Richardson “had enlarged the knowledge of human nature, and taught the passions to move at the command of virtue,” and she herself affirms that the experience of reading Pamela (1740) impresses “useful maxims and sentiments of virtue,” allowing readers to “rise better prepared to meet the ills of life with firmness.”[16]

Nevertheless, she remains emphatic that romances, like novels, had a foundation in reality. In “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing,” she recognizes that “all fictions have probably grown out of real adventures” and that realism had always been a matter of degree rather than kind, a recognition that encourages her to categorize the ancient “Milesian Tales” as “novels” and Theagenes and Chariclea, written by Heliodorus, as “romance or novel.”[17] Regarding the “[t]ales of magic and enchantment” that once prevailed as the dominant form of prose fiction, she speculates that they “probably took their rise from the awe and wonder with which the vulgar looked upon any instance of superior skill in mechanics or medicine, or acquaintance with any of the hidden properties of nature.”[18] In summing up the lasting appeal of prose fiction towards the end of her essay, she observes that “the humble novel is always ready … to take man from himself … and, while the moving picture of life passes before him, to make him forget the subject of his own complaints,” reflecting that

[i]t is pleasant to the mind to sport in the boundless regions of possibility; to find relief from the sameness of every-day occurrences by expatiating amidst brighter skies and fairer fields; to exhibit love that is always happy, valour that is always successful; to feed the appetite for wonder by a quick succession of marvellous events; and to distribute, like a ruling providence, rewards and punishments which fall just where they ought to fall.[19]

The terms that Barbauld employs here in her tribute to the “humble novel” cannot but recall the language of romance, making the point that the novel, despite a change in content and new effort at realistic effect, retained an essential aspect of romance, directly tied to an unabated readerly “appetite for wonder.”[20] There is a similar embedded message in the passage already cited above, in which Barbauld imagines the magical transformation of the princess and her “moated castle” into more modern and ordinary equivalents, with a critical vocabulary that borrows freely from romance. In an early prose piece, “The Hill of Science: A Vision,” published in 1773, Barbauld identifies the experience of wonder as core to fiction in every form. The narrator of this piece describes “the fields of Fiction, filled with a variety of wild flowers springing up in the greatest luxuriance, of richer scents and brighter colours than … observed in any other climate,” a description that she perhaps has in mind when she speaks of the “brighter skies and fair fields” conjured up by “the humble novel” in “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing.”[21] The homage to the novel’s capacity to make readers lose themselves in the “moving picture of life” arguably serves to strengthen the connection between this fictional genre and wonder in evoking the image of the magic lantern and the wonders of the projected entertainments that continued to be popular throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[22] In another early piece of critical writing, “An Enquiry into those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations,” also published in 1773, Barbauld explores a different source of wonder common to romances and novels, with an evident debt to Edmund Burke’s categories of the sublime and the beautiful, as set out in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). As she contends here, in representing scenes of distress, all fictional writing possessed the capacity to inspire either “wonder and admiration” or “love and pity,” depending on whether characters displayed “fortitude, power, and strength of mind” or “gentleness, grace, and beauty.”[23]

Surveying the recent annals of fiction in the prefatory essay to The British Novelist series, Barbauld surmises that women are better qualified than men to produce fictional scenes of distress. She submits further that novels by women display a characteristic “melancholy tinge” and sentiment, in contrast to the comedy that prevails in novels by men.[24] She attributes this difference to the fact that women must “nurse those feelings in secrecy and silence,” which men usually experience only “transiently,” positing “that men, mixing at large in society, have a brisker flow of ideas, and, seeing a greater variety of characters, introduce more of the business and pleasures of life into their productions” and perhaps possess greater “humour,” which “is a scarcer product of the mind than sentiment, and more congenial to … [their] stronger powers.”[25] Advertently or inadvertently, there are echoes of her 1775 “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, on Sects, and on Establishments,” where she declares that “[t]here is an extreme delicacy in all the finer affections, which makes them shy of observation, and easily checked,” an assertion that prompts her to remark that “Love, Wonder, Pity … shrink from the notice of even an indifferent eye, and never indulge themselves freely but in solitude, or when heightened by the powerful force of sympathy.”[26]

In comparatively assessing the fiction written by men and women, Barbauld tacitly challenges the assumption of Johnson and other male critics that the principal worth of the novel lay in its representation of a broad picture of nature and society. In his famous preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), Henry Fielding characterizes the novel as a species of fiction modelled on the epic and comedy rather than upon “those voluminous Works commonly called Romances, namely, Clelia, Cleopatra, Astraea, Cassandra, the Grand Cyrus, and innumerable others,” coining the descriptive terms “comic Romance” and “comic Epic-Poem in Prose” to reinforce the distinction between novels and romances.[27] He goes on to state that the novel “differ[s] from Comedy, as the serious Epic from Tragedy: its Action being more extended and comprehensive; containing a much larger Circle of Incidents, and introducing a greater Variety of Characters.”[28] The emphasis on breadth of action and variety of characters presents the novel as a masculine and worldly alternative to the seventeenth-century French romances. While Johnson is likely thinking about Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett when he warns in The Rambler No. 4 against novelists “who mingle good and bad qualities in their principal personages,”[29] he can be seen at least in some measure as elaborating the former author’s critical account of the novel. Echoing Fielding, Johnson states that “[t]he works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind.”[30] “This kind of writing,” he affirms, “may be termed not improperly the comedy of romance, and is to be conducted nearly by the rules of comic poetry.”[31] His subsequent insistence that the composition of romance requires “no further care than to retire to … [the] closet, let loose … [the] invention, and heat … [the] mind with incredibilities … without the toil of study, without knowledge of nature, or acquaintance with life,” effectively privileges the novel over romance as a masculine and worldly form requiring broad knowledge of both nature and society.[32] Like Johnson, Barbauld might be nodding to Fielding in her statement that “[a] good novel is an epic in prose, with more of the character and less (indeed in modern novels nothing) of the supernatural machinery.”[33] Introducing her selection from Fielding, Joseph Andrews, in volume 18 of The British Novelists series, she takes up his analogy between the novel and comedy, when she poses the following rhetorical question: “[W]hat is a comedy, but a short story, or novel put into dialogue?”[34] Submitting to the conception of the novel as an expression of worldly knowledge, Barbauld allows in her prefatory essay to The British Novelists that “[s]ome knowledge of the world is … gained by [novels,] … attained with more ease, and attended with less danger, than by mixing in real life.”[35]

At the same time, she seems to believe that the novel finally plays a more important role for male and female readers as a stimulus to morality and feeling than as a source of knowledge. As she states in the introduction to Richardson’s correspondence, in all countries fictional representations

have been grafted upon the actions of their heroes … interwoven with their mythology … moulded upon the manners of the age, and, in return, have influenced not a little the manners of the next generation, by the principles they have insinuated, and the sensibilities they have exercised. A spirit of adventure, a high sense of honour, of martial glory, refined and romantic passion, sentimental delicacy, or all the melting sensibilities of humanity, have been, in their turns, inspired by this powerful engine, which takes so strong a hold on the fancy and the passions of young readers.[36]

From this passage it appears that one of the moral advantages of fiction lay in the capacity for idealized representation, captivating readers with images of “ideal excellence,” as Barbauld puts it in “On Romances: An Imitation” (1773), and strategically re-appropriating age-old defenses of poetry stressing the moral advantages of art that improves upon nature, from Aristotle to Sidney and onwards.[37] Indeed, she warns that novels remained inevitably limited as sources of knowledge. Despite the efforts of novelists to adhere more strictly to the truth, novels would, in her view, “always be different from real life, and therefore always, perhaps, in some degree, dangerous to the young mind.”[38] With respect to Richardson, she notes that while “he took the incidents, manners, and general character, of the times in which he lived,” “he drew equally from nature and from his own ideas.”[39] The result is a number of improbabilities in his narratives and in his characters. In another essay, “On the Uses of History,” included in her posthumous Works (1825), Barbauld weighs the relative merits of history and fiction, concluding that “man must be shown as the being he really is, or no real knowledge is gained” and explicitly warning readers not to take literally novels such as Richardson’s The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753) and Madame de La Fayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678).[40] While she has generally high words of praise for romances and novels, identifying them in “On Romances: An Imitation” as belonging to “the multifarious productions which the efforts of superior genius … have crowded upon the world” and in the introduction to Richardson’s correspondence as deserving “no mean rank among the productions of genius,” Barbauld cannot entirely dismiss their dangers in the hands of naïve and unworldly readers.[41]

According to Barbauld, a special susceptibility to feeling advantaged women not only as writers but also as readers of fiction. In another posthumously published prose piece entitled “On Female Studies” (1826), she argues that a woman’s “very seclusion from the jarring interests and coarser amusements of society … fit her in a peculiar manner for the worlds of fancy and sentiment, and dispose her to the quickest relish of what is pathetic, sublime, or tender.”[42] Directly addressing her female reader, she proposes that “the beauties of poetry, of moral painting, and all in general that is comprised under the term of polite literature, lie particularly open” to women.[43] Interestingly, it is this situation of relative seclusion that prompts Barbauld further to recommend scientific alongside literary reading. As she underscores, science has the capacity to excite wonder through defamiliarization, teaching us “not to despise common things” and generating “interest in every thing … [we] see.”[44] Through acquiring knowledge of science, she implies, the most sheltered women might enjoy wonder in the “common things” they encounter every day. As such, Barbauld offers a preemptive challenge to Watt’s view that Enlightenment natural philosophy or science acted straightforwardly as a force of disenchantment. Indeed, her speculation in “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing” that the magic and marvels of romance arose from a lay ignorance of mechanics, medicine, and the workings of nature suggests that science had served all along as a source of wonder and inspiration for authors.

While Barbauld never produced a novel of her own, she drew deliberately on science as a source of wonder in her poetry. In this project, she evidently took cues from her brother, John Aikin, who in An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (1777) urges poets to study natural history in order to counter “the insipidity of Modern Poetry” and “supineness and servile imitation,” which had “prevailed to a greater degree in the description of nature, than in any other part of poetry.”[45] Notable examples of Barbauld’s efforts this way include “To Mrs. P[riestley], with some Drawings of Birds and Insects” (1773) and “The Invitation: To Miss B*****” (1773). In the second poem, Barbauld explicitly connects the study of natural history with wonder, imagining young male students at the liberal Dissenting academy in Warrington who “[w]ith sharpen’d eyes inspect an hornet’s sting / And all the wonders of an insect’s wing” (157–58).[46] The two poems repeatedly conflate the wonders of science with those of romance. As editors William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft note, the sight of “the Insect race” (73) “burst[ing] their silken shell” (80) and, after a moment’s hesitation, “launch[ing] at once upon the untried air” (82), in the first poem, elicits “two scenes from Torquato Tasso’s [early modern romance] Gerusalemme Liberata (1581) … one … [in which] the hero Tancred stabs a tree only to discover that he has stabbed his beloved Clorinda, imprisoned in it” and a second in which “the hero Rinaldo witnesses the ‘marvel’ of trees giving birth to young women.”[47] Romance continues to serve as a reference point throughout the entire poem. It manifests itself, for instance, in Barbauld’s descriptions of the birds who “haunt the rushy moor” and “lonely woods” (25); “[t]he tawny EAGLE” who “seats his callow brood / High on the cliff, and feasts his young with blood” (31–32), and “forms” “his lonely kingdom … / Amidst the gathering clouds, and sullen storms” (35–36); and the purple-crested “silver PHEASANT” (48) who originates “[o]n Asia’s myrtle shores, by Phasis’ stream” (49) but who has now become a “beauteous captive” (53) in his current alien environment. With the pheasant, we enter specifically into the realm of Oriental romance. Equally evocative of Oriental romance are the butterflies with “wings” of

… azure, green, and purple gloss’d,
Studded with colour’d eyes, with gems emboss’d,
Inlaid with pearl, and mark’d with various stains
Of lively crimson thro’ their dusky veins.

105–108

Immediately following this gorgeous image of brightly coloured butterfly wings, we are self-consciously returned to the realm of medieval romance with “the proud giant of the beetle race” (113) whose “polish’d limbs” (114) are enclosed in “shining arms” (114), “[l]ike some stern warrior formidably bright” (115). Barbauld indirectly suggests a continuity between the world of modern science and that of medieval romance elsewhere in “Verses written on the Back of an old Visitation Copy of the Arms of Dr. Priestley’s Family, with Proposals for a New Escutcheon” (according to the editors, probably written around 1769 and not published until 1994), where she teases her friend, the noted experimental philosopher Joseph Priestley, that he needs to update his family arms, proposing a design with a blue background and a substitution of the following elements: “lightnings” (20), “meteors” (20), and “Liberty” with “her cap and spear” (22) “[f]or the plum’d helmet, and the broken lance” (21); “the mild sceptre of the pastoral crook” (24) for “the rude compulsive grappling hook” (23); and the figures of Science and Fame for the “lions guarding hostile towers” (25).[48] In “The Invitation: To Miss B*****,” romance comes together with modern technology in the description of the Bridgewater canal system that prominently features as part of the landscape around Warrington. Following a brief account of the canal system’s construction, the poet imagines a passing traveller, who

… with pleasing wonder sees
The white sail gleaming thro’ the dusky trees;
And views the alter’d landscape with surprise,
And doubts the magic scenes which round him rise.
Now, like a flock of swans, above his head
Their woven wings the flying vessels spread.…

67–72

To the amazed traveller, the appearance of the vessels making their way through the Bridgewater canal system in this passage evidently resembles the swan chariots of fairy tale. As we know, fairy tales provided a rich ongoing source of material for romance, especially of the medieval variety, and continued to exert a powerful fascination over the collective imagination well after the eighteenth century, as witnessed by the success, for example, of the Brothers Grimm (Wilhelm and Jacob), Hans Christian Andersen, Andrew Lang, and many others. The traveller who mistakes the Bridgewater canal system for a magical mode of transportation invites direct comparison to the audience for medieval romances that Barbauld discusses in “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing,” whose taste for this kind of fiction was nourished by the wonder its members experienced in real life encounters with superior scientific knowledge and skill.[49] A different kind of modern technology produces a similar moment of wonder in “Inscription for an Ice-House” (1795; 1825). The poem begins with a direct address to a “Stranger” (1), whom the poet bids enter the “iron door / Thrice locked and bolted” (1–2) in order to admire the “rude arch beneath / That vaults with ponderous stone the cell” (2–3) where “man, the great magician, who controls / Fire, earth and air, and genii of the storm” (4–5) and who “bends the most remote and opposite things / To do him service and perform his will” (6–7), has imprisoned the giant Winter and made him “fair Pleasure’s minister” (20). The mingled images from Oriental romances and chivalric romances such as Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596) signal yet another entry into the world of romance.

This interest in capturing scientific wonders in poetry did not preclude a somewhat complicated attitude towards the project of Enlightenment natural philosophy. A number of critics have established Barbauld’s ambivalence to at least certain aspects of eighteenth-century scientific practice.[50] In “The Invitation: To Miss B*****,” Barbauld arguably distinguishes different approaches within the sciences, juxtaposing the Warrington students enamoured of “all the wonders of an insect’s wing” with other students at the academy who

… trace with curious search the hidden cause
Of nature’s changes, and her various laws;
Untwist her beauteous web, disrobe her charms,
And hunt her to her elemental forms.…

159–62

In this passage, experimental philosophy emerges as encouraging an attitude towards nature very different from that of natural history. It positions scientists in a potentially antagonistic and exploitative relationship with nature. Barbauld notably warns against the possible revenge of the physical world in “Inscription for an Ice-House,” comparing Winter confined to the ice-house not only to a giant who has been bound in service to “fair Pleasure,” but also to the Biblical Samson who has been enslaved in the temple of the Philistines. Regardless of such reservations, however, Barbauld evidently recognizes the products of modern science and engineering, such as canals and refrigeration, as no less conducive to the experience of wonder than objects in nature.

The repeated blurring of the wonders of science and romance in her writings might finally beg the question of the extent to which Barbauld, at least, is reinventing wonder. Barbauld places magic and science, like romances and novels, along the same continuum. Her writings suggest both that the taste for wonders remained undiminished in the modern world and that its sources were not necessarily that different from what they had been in the past. Yet it seems unlikely that Barbauld would have disputed Kareem’s point that the Enlightenment had changed the character of romances in certain important respects. In Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder, Kareem posits that eighteenth-century Gothic romances such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) counted on having a readership that could discriminate between fact and fiction, and appreciate the wonders of romance as an essentially aesthetic experience. As she effectively establishes, while The Castle of Otranto might initially appear somewhat removed from the mainstream tradition of literary realism, it nevertheless illustrates some of the very same literary techniques as Fielding’s “comic Romance.”[51] In an early and often overlooked critical piece, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, A Fragment” (1773), Aikin notably recognizes that

[t]he old Gothic romance and the Eastern tale, with their genii, giants, enchantments, and transformations, however a refined critic may censure them as absurd and extravagant, will ever retain a most powerful influence on the mind, and interest the reader, independently of all peculiarity of taste.[52]

Aikin acknowledges having wondered himself at the persisting allure of such fictions and often speculating that readers were primarily motivated by the need to relieve “suspense” or satisfy “curiosity,” preferring “the smart pang of a violent emotion” to “the uneasy craving of an unsatisfied desire.”[53] However, he insists that he has since come around to the view that these fictions give readers genuine “pleasure,” in “the excitement of surprise from new and wonderful objects.”[54] Specifically with regard to fictional manifestations of the supernatural, he states that they stimulate “our imagination,” which, “darting forth, explores with rapture the new world … laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers,” and that together “[p]assion” and “fancy” “elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement.”[55] He contends, moreover, that

the more wild, fanciful, and extraordinary are the circumstances of a scene of horror, the more pleasure we receive from it; and where they are too near common nature, though violently borne by curiosity through the adventure, we cannot repeat it, or reflect on it, without an over-balance of pain.[56]

In this way, he grants romances an enduring advantage over novels in the distance the former maintained from “common nature.”

The recognition that the eighteenth century never saw a straightforward shift from romance to realism and that wonder remained a crucial aspect of the experience of fiction well beyond the end of this period invites continuing reappraisal of “the rise of the novel” narrative. Margaret Anne Doody explains how the effort to distance the novel from romances during the eighteenth century and to exploit the criteria of “‘[p]robability’ and ‘verisimilitude’” formed part of an attempt “to discipline the … [novel] and make it acceptable,” allowing it to “enter the Kingdom of Literature—or the Republic of Letters.”[57] As already noted, the critical writings of Fielding and Johnson can be identified as part of this effort. In The Rambler No. 4, Johnson claims that novels “are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introductions into life.”[58] It is the perceived role that novels play in providing juvenile readers with knowledge of the world and moral guidance that apparently interests him as a critic rather than any strong sense of their artistic merit. That said, Johnson still clearly much prefers novels to romances, and, like Fielding, he is fully prepared to sacrifice romances in order to give the novel some modicum of literary respectability. In elevating the novel at the expense of romance, Fielding and Johnson seem to be positioning the former as an inherently masculine genre, although, as Doody underlines, the gender politics of romances and novels were never straightforward, and if “[o]ne way of looking at prose fiction before the eighteenth century is to assume that it is an old-fashioned, feudal, and feminine thing, which it is necessary to turn into an appropriately modern and manly thing,” and “another way of looking at the same process of history is to assume that prose fiction before the eighteenth century was manly and heroic, while in the new era it is domestic and feminine.”[59] In the twentieth century, Fielding’s and Johnson’s similar accounts of the history of the novel can be seen as indirectly picked up by Watt and others. One reason seems to have been an interest in the novel as a product of Western European modernity. It remains indisputable that the forces identified by Watt as having produced the novel have significantly shaped its development. Situating the novel historically in relation to an emergent commercial capitalist order has continued to generate insights. An excellent recent example is Mary Poovey’s analysis of how interests connected to a new system of financing contributed towards the establishment of a category of fiction separate from that of non-fiction.[60] However, as Doody points out, circumscribing the story of the novel in this way equally runs the risk of obscuring what she calls “the true ‘Great Tradition’ stretching back not only to [Giovanni] Boccaccio but to Apuleius and Heliodorus.”[61] The novel has been too easily reduced to an artefact of Western European modernity, associated with the rise of bourgeois, commercial capitalism and secularization, ignoring not only past but also non-Western European contributions to the development of the novel as a form.[62] To some, it might further seem that a rather mundane, as well as incomplete, sense of the novel has prevailed, and that we are overdue for a re-enchantment of eighteenth-century fiction.