27 - Theories of the novel

Summary

Nineteenth century novel theorists tended to treat fiction from the reader's perspective rather than from the perspective of composition. Their goal was not to elaborate a theory of aesthetic value, but to describe the cultural force of a form, a goal better performed from the end of reception than that of production. Private, solitary reading, and the host of facts associated with it, becomes the datum that defines both the novel's function and its form. The centrality of plot to the novel is only a way of registering the disappearance of personal distinctiveness in a mechanized and democratized world. The theory of the novel in the nineteenth century began with the efforts of psychological and physiological criticism to study the novel's dematerialized audience: that virtual, invisible mass public that had made the novel the dominant form of its day.