Revolutionary Multiplicity and the Future of Form

Novels of the 1790s are routinely denigrated for their formal failures even when they are praised for their politics. In this article, the author argues that these novels often feature an aesthetic of multiplicity that embraces shifts in setting and narrative voice, leaps of temporality, inserted documents, subplots, side narratives, and plural protagonists. These multiplicities challenge the formal singularity that has been promoted as the core aesthetic of the rising novel, shaking up narrative in ways that offer analogues to the upheavals of the Revolutionary age. The author also proposes that multiplicities of form help to effect a transformation of the European novel from its “pseudofactual” to its explicitly fictional and generically capacious mode, with analogues in the novel of ideas as well as in postmodern experiments of our own time. Far from being a dead end, the 1790s novel serves as a harbinger for the formal multiplicities of fiction tout court.