This chapter, the second of two chapters on the eighteenth-century novel, focuses on the contractive urge in the novel of the period, and the attempt to picture organically whole bodies in the novel form as it develops from Fielding, Sterne and Richardson to Burney and Goethe. It suggests that this strand in the eighteenth-century novel, in opposition to the expansive drive explored in the previous chapter, is shaped by a desire for what Coleridge theorises as an organic aesthetic, but it argues too that even as the novel of the period is invested in such pictures of organic completion, it opens up forms of distance between mind and body which are the province of the prosthetic imagination.

This chapter reassesses the role of the novel in producing an economy of scale within which to picture the eighteenth-century body, under colonial conditions. It suggests that the novel of the period is driven by two imperatives, at once to produce an expanded picture of the body at a remove from itself and to produce an opposite image of a bound, organically complete body, which is proof against the alienating effects of colonial distance. The chapter then goes on to explore the first of these two drives, as it is expressed in the novel from from Aphra Behn to Daniel Defoe to Jonathan Swift and Sarah Scott.