Given the traditional identification of institution solely with either origins or mature cultural formation, if not its ossification, one must begin by examining the word and concept “institution” and, especially, by draWing out some of the implications regarding literature or the novel as institutions.

Literature, which only took its modern meaning in the late eighteenth century, has been called (or thought of as) an institution at least since Hippolyte Taine in the mid-nineteenth century. Poetry had been considered an institution in the Scottish enlightenment and at least as far back as Vico’sNew Science,¹ although, as his modern English translators...

Traditionally, two of the ways the novel has had of at once disguising and validating itself have been as letters and as gossip.¹ Both ways differ from the mask many novels take on as “true histories,” establishing or putting into question their authority while at the same time underlining certain essential characteristics of narrative fictions. As letters, there are, of course, novels such asPamela, Clarissa,andHumphrey Clinker,and there are the novels which claim or imply an origin in gossip such asVanity Fair, Wuthering Heights,several of Hawthorne’s novels, and perhaps Trollope’s Barsetshire chronicles. Beyond their uses...

Names, false names, and absence of names seem to have special importance for Daniel Defoe’s novels.¹ None of his fictional narrators, with the exception of Robinson Crusoe, tell their stories under the names they were born with.² The Narrator ofA Journal of the Plague Yearis anonymous, signing his account at the end with the initials “H. F.” In the other novels, the narrators receive their names in something like a special christening. Bob Singleton is given his name by one of the series of “mothers” through whose hands he passes after being kidnapped from his true parents. Colonel...

No one seems ever to have been literal-minded enough to quibble with the most obviously fictional element of the titles of Henry Fielding’s two novels—The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews[etc.] andThe History of Tom Jones a Foundling.¹

Before addressing larger problems of the relationship of fiction to truth (however it is defined), one might note the curious fact that, even within their own respective systems of reference, the titles are superficially fictional or fictitious—that is to say, they are erroneous. What the reader learns along with the protagonists at the unraveling of the narrative...

In Tristram Shandy, the narration of the birth of Tristram, the narrator, is constantly displaced and deferred, as everybody knows.¹ Things fall, get in the way, have to be explained. The pointed failure of his attempt to narrate the event of his own birth is not an indifferent matter for an autobiographer, however, since that moment could be described as the absolute precondition of any narration at all. Inasmuch as this is a particularly “selfconscious,” self-reflexive narrative, we are always tempted to try to read any of these “things” which substitute for the narration of that birth as symbolical or...

The reference to the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion in Sir Walter Scott’s subtitle toWaverley—or ’Tis Sixty Years Since¹ is so well known and seemingly commonsensical as to deflect the equally strong reference to Fielding’sThe History of Tom Jones, a Foundling,also set during the ’45 Rebellion and published just four years after its bloody conclusion. Scott named Fielding “the first of British Novelists,” a category to which Scott’s Waverley was itself to be a major, innovative contribution.² Scott’s story of a young English man on the road to discover and prove himself, at the very same time Tom’s...

In this chapter, my study of the novel’ institutions reveals itself to be circular, a seemingly constant strategy inherent in the very nature of institutions and their self-histories. I plan here to explore Scott’s very material contribution to the institution of the English novel, but in order to do so, I find it useful to return to Scott, Watt, and my earliest “novelist,” Daniel Defoe. Scott’s fascination with Defoe itself resulted in a significant impact on the revival and reassessment of this originary figure, but it is also the very indeterminancy of the canon and its generic specificity, not to...