Abstract
The rise of British empiricism put imaginative literature in a tough spot. It discredited the epistemic defenses of poetry the Renaissance owed to Antiquity, pressing poets and fictionists to either resign their cognitive ambitions or reaffirm them in accordance with new rules. The challenge was met in at least three different ways during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Romantic poets denied empiricism’s authority to decide on matters of knowledge, whereas novelists who accepted that authority either professed to be mere entertainers or tried to bring the novel into alignment with the epistemology of the day. The last development is the topic of this book. In order to contextualize my discussion of particular cases, I set up in this introduction the broader intellectual stage on which my central figures played their roles.
May God never allow us to publish a dream of our imagination as a model of the world.
Sir Francis Bacon, Instauratio Magna
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, 2d edn. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 95. Parenthetical references are in Bekker numbers.
- 2.
For a detailed discussion, see Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), particularly 129–143.
- 3.
Sir Philip Sidney, Defense of Poesy, ed. Lewis Soens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 16.
- 4.
For a helpful historical survey, see J.R. Milton, “Induction before Hume.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 38, No. 1 (March 1987), 49–74.
- 5.
Sidney’s commitment to the theory of Ideas is less explicit than Dennis’s, but critics have often taken his position to be nonetheless Platonic. See, for instance, Mark Roberts, “The Pill and the Cherries: Sidney and the Neo-Classical Tradition,” Essays in Criticism, XVI, No. 1 (1966), 22–31. For a more reticent view, see Wesley Trimpi’s “Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: The Renaissance, Vol. III, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 187–198.
- 6.
Dennis, “Reflections Critical and Satyrical, Upon a Late Rhapsody, Call’d, An Essay upon Criticism,” The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward N. Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939), Vol. I, 418, n. 1.
- 7.
According to Dennis, “Tragedy and Epick Poetry are more grave and more philosophical than History, because they are more general, so they are more persuasive than Philosophy, because they are more delightful.” “Remarks on a Book Entituled, Prince Arthur, An Heroic Poem.” The Critical Works of John Dennis, Vol. 1, p. 70.
- 8.
Aristotle defines sense perception as our capacity to apprehend first principles, and ultimately universals. The relevant statements are Posterior Analytics, II, 19, and Metaphysics, I. He notes in the former: “It is plain that we must get to know the primitives by induction; for this is the way in which perception instills universals.” Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, trans. Jonathan Barnes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 74.
- 9.
Cicero, Orator, in Brutus; Orator, trans. H.M. Hubbell, (Cambridge, MA, and London: Loeb Classical Library, 1962), section ii, §8–10, 311–313.
- 10.
For Cicero’s influence on Renaissance mimetic theory, see John Stephens’s The Italian Renaissance: The Origins of Intellectual and Artistic Change before the Reformation (New York: Routledge, 1990), especially 88–98. Reynolds’s response to Cicero illustrates well the effects of empiricism on art theory. While a staunch Neoclassicist, Reynolds rejects the theory of Ideas in favor of a naturalistic model, according to which that “ideal perfection and beauty…are not to be sought in the heavens, but upon the earth.” Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1959), 43.
- 11.
This particular formulation is by Plotinus (Enneads, V, viii). Cited in William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York, 1957), 117.
- 12.
Dryden nonetheless favors observation in the case of comedy and tragedy. See “A Parallel of Poetry and Painting” in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W.P. Ker (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), Vol. II, 115–153.
- 13.
The most comprehensive study of the interactions between Platonic and Aristotelian models of mimesis is Stephen Halliwell’s The Aesthetics of Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); see Chapter 12 for the post-Renaissance period. The canonical discussion of how Platonic Ideas came to inform Renaissance defenses of the arts is Erwin Panofsky’s Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph J.S. Peake (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968). The persistence of this tradition into literary neoclassicism is traced in a classic article by Louis I. Bredvold: “The Tendency toward Platonism in Neo-Classical Esthetics,” ELH, 1, No. 2 (September 1934), 91–119.
- 14.
Segni, Ragionamento sopra le cose pertinenti alla poetica (Fiorenza, 1581), 65. Quoted in Hathaway, Age of Criticism, 139.
- 15.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Classics, 1982), 1.4, 102. Locke puts it even more tersely: “All things that exist are only particulars,” and Hume echoes Locke: “Every thing, that exists, is particular: And therefore it must be our several particular perceptions, that compose the mind.” John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975), 3.3.6, 410. David Hume, “An Abstract of…a Treatise of Human Nature,” in A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 414.
- 16.
Bacon, The Advancement of Learning. In Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 178. Further references will be to this edition.
- 17.
Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 25.
- 18.
I will have little to say about the first two problems, as the epistemic challenges they raise would apply not only to imaginative literature but to all linguistic representation. A penetrating discussion of how these challenges inflected first-person narratives and the modern linguistic turn is provided by Elena Russo in Skeptical Selves. Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), esp. 8–23 and 58–66.
- 19.
Francis Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), in The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. II, ed. James Spedding, Robert Ellis, and Douglas Heath (Boston: Brown and Taggard, 1861), 413. For a full English translation of De Augmentis (by Spedding), see Vol. IV of the Works.
- 20.
Hobbes, typically, claims that “the Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the end.” Leviathan, I. iv, 116–117.
- 21.
Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society (1667), reproduced in J.E. Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), Vol. II, 119.
- 22.
Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie. Quoted in George Williamson, “The Restoration Revolt Against Enthusiasm,” Studies in Philology, 30, No. 4 (1933), 592.
- 23.
Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975), 3.10.34, p. 506. Cited from now on as ECHU.
- 24.
E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, “Introduction” to An Essay on Criticism, in Alexander Pope, Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope (London and New York: Routledge, 1961), 217.
- 25.
For two illuminating studies, see John Richetti’s Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1983), and Jules David Law’s The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I.A. Richards (Ithaca and London: Cornel University Press, 1993).
- 26.
The implication is that the empiricist outlook remains indebted to the “emblematic worldview” of the Renaissance. Courtney Weiss Smith, Empiricist Devotions. Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016). The classic account of the emblematic worldview is William B. Ashworth’s “Natural History and the Emblematic Worldview,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, 303–332.
- 27.
Robert Boyle, “Of the Usefulness of Experimental Philosophy, Principally as it Relates to the Mind of Man.” The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunger and Edward B. Davis (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), 232.
- 28.
See Leviathan, 1.8, 136. In spite of his famous condemnation of metaphor, Hobbes’s was more tolerant of figurative language than critics have usually claimed. For a balanced account, see Andreas Musolff, “Ignes Fatui or Apt Similitudes?—The Apparent Denunciation of Metaphor by Thomas Hobbes,” in Hobbes Studies XVIII (2005), 96–112.
- 29.
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment. An Interpretation. Vol. II. The Science of Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 215.
- 30.
Spedding’s translation. The original reads: “Poësis (quæ principio phantasiæ attributa est) pro lusu potius ingenii quam pro scientia habenda.” De Augmentis Scientiarum, in The Works of Francis Bacon, IV, 406, and II, 360. While Bacon acknowledges poetry’s appeal and praises the poetry of the Bible, he insists that “it is not good to stay too long in the theater [i.e. the province of the imagination]: let us pass on to the judicial place or palace of the mind, which we are to approach and view, with more reverence and attention” (Advancement, 186, 188).
- 31.
“Advice to Fulke Greville,” in Bacon, The Major Works, 105.
- 32.
In this connection, see George Nadel, “Philosophy of History before Historicism,” History and Theory, 3, No. 3 (1964), 291–315; Dario Perinetti, “Philosophical Reflection on History,” The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, Vol. II, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1107–1140; and Michel Baridon, “Historiography,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. IV: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 282–301.
- 33.
Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2002 [1987]), 47–104.
- 34.
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 32. I take the term “empiricist mimesis” from Leo Damrosch’s Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson (Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 59–60.
- 35.
Revisionist readings that reassert the centrality of romance and the marvelous include Margaret Anne Doody’s The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick,. N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), Sarah Tindal Kareem’s Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014), and McKeon himself.
- 36.
I am drawing here on J. Paul Hunter’s account of how readerly desire—understood as “a cultural and communal phenomenon”—allowed eighteenth-century readers to influence the formal development of the novel. See Hunter, Before Novels. The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1990), xix, 197–198. For the growing prestige of factual discourse in this period, see Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact. England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), esp. 199–207.
- 37.
William Dampier, A New Voyage round the World (London: Printed for James Knapton, 1703), A3.
- 38.
Daniel Defoe, A New Voyage round the World, by a Course never Sailed before (London: Printed for A. Bettesworth and W. Mears, 1725), 4.
- 39.
William Dampier, New Voyage, A2; Defoe, New Voyage, B2.
- 40.
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and Other Writings, ed. Paul Salzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 6.
- 41.
The topos seems to owe its current name to McKeon’s Origins. For its history prior to this period, see William Nelson’s Fact or Fiction. The Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973).
- 42.
For an insightful discussion of Gulliver’s Travels as a parody of emerging novelistic procedures, see J. Paul Hunter’s “Gulliver’s Travels and the Novel,” in The Genres of Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Frederick N. Smith (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 56–74.
- 43.
Charles Gildon, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D—DeF— (London: J. Roberts, 1719), 33.
- 44.
Henry Fielding, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Shamela, and Occasional Writings, ed. Martin C. Battestin (1755; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2008), 194.
- 45.
Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. With his Vision of the Angelic World, ed. George A. Aitken (London: J.M. Dent & Co, 1895), ix.
- 46.
Underlying Defoe’s hesitancy to take a stance for fiction was the Protestant concern that fictions were lies and therefore sinful. In his view, to write a romance “with Design to deceive the Reader, bring him to believe, that the Fact related was true” is “criminal and wicked, and making a Lye.” A New Family Instructor (London: printed for T. Warner, 1727), 52–53.
- 47.
Richardson tells the ur-Pamela story on separate occasions to Aaron Hill and Johannes Stinstra. Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 40, 232.
- 48.
McKeon treats the rise of aesthetics only briefly in Origins. For a more thorough articulation of his thesis, see Michael McKeon, “Mediation as Primal Word: The Arts, the Sciences, and the Origins of the Aesthetic,” in This is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 384–412.
- 49.
Zimmerman, The Boundaries of Fiction. History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 21.
- 50.
Bender, “Novel Knowledge. Judgment, Experience, Experiment,” in This is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 286.
- 51.
Nicholas Paige argues, in what I find to be one of the best studies of the topic, that the regime of pseudofactual narratives extended for much longer than the mid-eighteenth century, citing numerous examples from much later periods. But Paige is hesitant to make a distinction that is far from trivial for my purposes here—that between genuine attempts to deceive readers (such as Defoe’s in A Journal of the Plague Year and Memoirs of a Cavalier) and the less literal claims to historicity of later periods. Thus, Clarissa and Tom Jones, for Paige, belong in the regime of the pseudofactual, in spite of Richardson’s and Fielding’s candid recognition of their authorship. By contrast, within the terms of the debate I am tracing these novels counted as explicit fictions. See Nicholas Paige, Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
- 52.
William Donaldson, The Life and Adventures of Sir Bartholomew Sapskull, Baronet (London: Printed for J. Williams, 1768; reprt. New York and London: Garland, 1975), 2. Edward Kimber, The Life and Adventures of Joe Thompson (New York: Garland, 1974).
- 53.
The Adventurer, 16, December 30, 1752. Reproduced in Ioan Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance 1700–1800. A Documentary Record (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 199.
- 54.
Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (London and New York: Pandora, 1987), 4–5.
- 55.
See, for instance, Bacon, Instauratio Magna, 41; Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.5, 116; and Locke, ECHU, 2.31.10, 397–398.
- 56.
The Monthly Review, IV, March 1751. Reproduced in Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance, 162.
- 57.
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 9.11, 372.
- 58.
Lennox’s position is in fact somewhat more complex than this, as will be seen in Chapter 5.
- 59.
See “Mediation as Primal Word,” 397–408.
- 60.
George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 82.
- 61.
Smith also claims, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that novels can teach virtue more effectively than the metaphysical sophisms of the Stoics. I will have more to say about this peculiar defense of fictions in Chapter 6.
- 62.
Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J.C. Bryce (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 90.
- 63.
Michael Silverthorne’s translation, in Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 24. The original reads: “Neque enim hoc siuerit Deus, vt Phantasiæ nostræ somnium pro Exemplari Mundi edamus,” which Rees and Wakely translate as follows: “For God forbid that we give out a fantastic dream for a pattern of the world” (Instauratio, 45).
- 64.
Montagu recognizes but does not fully endorse this position: the Bookseller makes exceptions of Richardson and Fielding. The dialogue is one of four she contributed to Lord Lyttleton’s Dialogues of the Dead (1760). Reproduced in Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance, 224.
- 65.
A good discussion of the New Atlantis in the context of Bacon’s denunciations of fiction is Sarah Hutton’s “Persuasions to Science: Baconian Rhetoric and the New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, ed. Bronwen Price (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 48–59.
- 66.
See in particular Prince’s discussion of Berkeley’s Alciphron, in Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment. Theology, Aesthetics, and the Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), esp. 122–130.
- 67.
A magisterial discussion of this point is Brian Vickers’s “The Royal Society and English Prose Style: A Reassessment,” in Brian Vickers and Nancy S. Struever, Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth. Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Los Angeles: University of California, 1985).
- 68.
Peter Allan Dale discusses the blurry divide between the arts and the sciences during the Victorian period in his In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). The link with naturalism is discussed by Bender in relation to Zola (“Novel Knowledge,” 284–7).
- 69.
John Gibson, “Introduction. The Prospects of Literary Cognitivism,” in A Sense of the World. Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2007), 1. It is worth clarifying that this form of literary cognitivism bears no necessary relation to “literary cognitivism” as the term has come to be understood within cognitive cultural studies. In the latter sense, it designates the application, in literary studies, of insights derived from cognitive science. Two notable examples in eighteenth-century studies are Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), and Blakey Vermeule’s Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
- 70.
Three different ways of achieving this (while by no means the only ones) are suggested by Noël Carroll, Nelson Goodman, and Bernard Harrison. Carroll, who has written widely on the subject, argues that literature performs its cognitive function not by transmitting empirical knowledge, but by mobilizing, like a thought experiment, the conceptual knowledge that readers already possess. See, for example, “The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature, and Moral Knowledge,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 60, No. 1 (2002), 3.26. Goodman, in turn, radically reformulates the conditions for art in general to carry epistemic weight in Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1968), as well as in his many subsequent writings on aesthetics. Equally unconventionally, Harrison’s Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991) attempts to develop a cognitive defense of fiction from a Deconstructive perspective, without asking fiction to refer to an extra-textual reality. It should be added that not all analytic defenses of literature need be cognitive. The main example of a noncognitivist position is that of Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), which I discuss in this book’s conclusion.
- 71.
Examples include John Hospers, “Implied Truths in Literature,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 19, No. 1 (1960), 37–46; Hilary Putnam, “Literature, Science, and Reflection,” New Literary History, 7, No. 3 (1976), 483–491; Patrick Fessenbecker, “In Defense of Paraphrase,” New Literary History, 44, No. 1 (2013), 117–139; and Jukka Mikkonen, The Cognitive Value of Philosophical Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
- 72.
Examples are Dorothy Walsh, Literature and Knowledge (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969); Martha Nussbaum, “The Narrative Imagination,” in Cultivating Humanity. A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Catherine Z. Elgin, “The Laboratory of the Mind,” in A Sense of the World. Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge, ed. John Gibson et alia (New York: Routledge, 2007), 43–54.
- 73.
Green, “How and What We Can Learn from Fiction.” A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 352.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Maioli, R. (2016). Introduction. In: Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39859-4_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39859-4_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-39858-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-39859-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)