Today’s scholars agree that the origins of the English novel were messy and heterogeneous: As a form, the novel emerged in fits and starts from a primordial soup of other textual kinds. Yet the story of the relationship between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novels is often narrated as a more linear, sequential progress or rise: Trials and errors on the part of novelists like Fielding and Richardson gave rise to the more perfect aesthetic achievements of writers like Austen, who opened the door for the novel’s full flowering during the Victorian era. Conceptualized in this way, the history of the...

Over the past decade, scholarly interest in the history of books and printing has risen markedly, possibly as a result of the resonances between an age in which print was new and our own age of new electronic media.¹ An upsurge of interest in the novel of sensibility dates back a bit further; as Markman Ellis notes, the new critical approaches that became available in the 1980s led critics to reappraise the genre’s formal qualities and yielded a new set of historical, political, and cultural questions: “There is a sense in which the sentimental novel is ‘readable’ again now for...

As I have argued in Chapter 1, rather than mapping difference between self and other, the textual practice of sensibility is capable of differentiating both self and other, engaging specific features, forces, capacities, and micro-movements whose relations transgress social and symbolic categories and sift through representation. As Sterne’s fiction particularly illustrates, sensibility is also a radical sexual dynamic that differs markedly from oedipal patterns. If sympathy points us toward psychoanalytic models of desire, identity, and identification, sensibility points us toward Deleuze and Guattari, in whose work the unnamable intensities of difference are virtually synonymous with desire or libido in its...

A much challenged but still powerful understanding of literary history situates the achievement of the unified teleological plot (often ascribed to Jane Austen) as the culminating moment of the novel’s “rise.” This account is itself the product of a teleological, dialectical understanding of history, in which earlier works constitute necessary but insufficient beginnings or middles in an extended temporal progress toward a goal-state: a fully realized form. Early works contribute certain innovations but also reveal problems that are overcome by later writers, whose work preserves and synthesizes the earlier contributions. This dialectical progression is oriented toward the moment at which...

Recent literary and historical scholarship on curiosity, and the related affect of wonder, has shaped a history in which wonder undergoes a sea change during the Renaissance, and then yields cultural prominence to curiosity during the Restoration.¹ Both terms—oddly ambidextrous in that they can refer to either subjects or objects, and thus imply a special relationship between the two—have been subjected to intellectual, religious, and moral condemnation, often riding seesaw with each other. Throughout the Middle Ages, curiosity was understood as a major sin of intellectuals, a transgressive desire “to know more than God permits” (Benedict 18); the...

Thus far, I have tried to map several developments in the history of the British novel, tracing divergent practices of printing, communicating affect, plotting, and representing the particular. In each case, I have indicated the cultural selection of certain techniques or ideals over other variations, which became roads less traveled—in most cases, roads less traveled into the nineteenth century. In its most respected form, the nineteenth-century British novel favored transparent typography, sympathy’s affective dynamics, teleological plotting, and active curiosity’s subordination of the particular. By contrast, typographical emphasis, sensibility’s affective dynamics, cumulative plotting, and passive wonder’s pleasurable perception of the...