Plot, Fable, and the Novel: Intrigue and Early English Fiction

This article posits a new model for the narrative theory of early fiction that does not presuppose that authors were trying to write the kind of realist novel that became prominent a century later. Some writers from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries use the terms plot and fable in distinct and distinctive ways, with fable naming a broader concept not requiring plot. In this article, the author uses the period’s concept of fable to argue that in some works with loose or puzzling structures, the authors prioritized fable over plot. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719) are examples of fictions that succeed as fables.