What Is Eighteenth-Century Fiction?

This article argues that, for better and for worse, the novel is still the eighteenth-century novel and goes on to investigate why that is so. Reviving John Richetti’s claim that we have outlived the “ideological needs” served by “realism and psychological verisimilitude,” the author asks what the persistence of this mode of fictionality implies about the ongoing need for such a conventionalized form. The author tests the idea advanced by Catherine Gallagher that fictional characters restore readers to a sense of ontological fullness. She then turns to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748) and Frances Ferguson’s recent analysis of the influence of shorthand transcription on Richardson to examine Ferguson’s claim that stenography (as a representational mode of “your thoughts and words in my hand”) is a distillation of free indirect style. Ferguson’s formulation leads the author to D.W. Winnicott’s psychoanalytic framework of holding and to the proposal that the purpose of the (still eighteenth-century) novel is to facilitate vital processes of disintegration through an experience of presence.