| Novel Histories relocates the rise of the novel to the late nineteenth century through an extended analysis of the earliest histories of the novel. The rise of the novel occurred in the latter nineteenth century as part of a debate over the status of English literature as a university subject; literary historians composed the rise of the novel as a narrative of literary progress that would legitimate English studies as a discipline. My alternative account proves the significance of the novel to the institutionalization of English literature, as well as showing the importance of domestic fiction to the development of professional literary-historical discourse.; Novel Histories demonstrates the mutual involvement of novelists, critics and academics in the ongoing struggle over the status of the novel and its place in the academy. My dissertation shuttles back and forth across the line between literature and literary history, examining such canonical texts as Sense and Sensibility, Wuthering Heights, David Copperfield and Pendennis, as well as lesser-known works of literary history by David Masson, Walter Raleigh, George Saintsbury and others, in order to demonstrate the ways in which literary history comes to mirror its object of study, the ways in which form informs critical practice.; In Novel Histories I argue that nineteenth-century histories of the novel provided a progressive narrative of the novel's rise in which domestic fiction was seen as the culmination of novelistic development---that, as one writer puts it, "the novel of...domestic life, is the basal form." The apotheosis of the domestic novel in literary-historical discourse allowed for the creation of a gendered division of labor in which novelists were feminized and critics were masculinized; it also created a number of complications for both novelists and critics, as novelists resisted the constrictions of the domestic novel and critics found themselves borrowing both the form and the increasing moral authority of the novel for their own literary histories. |
