Captivity and Cultural Capital in the English Novel

Abstract

F.R. Leavis uses Austen to launch his account of the novel’s rise to respectability as a literary form during the course of the nineteenth century. He identifies her as the first novelist to matter in this respect and proceeds to track the “great tradition” from Austen through to its culmination in Henry James.¹ Assuming, thanks to Leavis, that with Austen’s career the rise of the novel was complete, Ian Watt never even speculates about the fate of the novel after it had become the preferred reading material of a new commercially-oriented middle class.² Despite their conflicting notions of what “the novel” is and how to tell its story, then, Leavis and Watt similarly refuse to deal with the question of what connects fiction before Jane Austen to that which comes after her. Together, they conspire to leave us wondering what a form of individualism defined by and authorizing the acquisition of property, according to Watt’s understanding of the novel’s mission, has to do with the ethically tortured relationship between subject and world to which Leavis attributes all proto-modernist formal innovations in fiction. Although my own study of the English novel describes domestic fiction as a continuous and indeed the dominant tradition from Defoe to Woolf,³ I never did say, at least not in so many words, how that tradition required and survived the jolting shift in form and function we experience when leaving the domain of Watt and entering that of Leavis.