Novel Machines

Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain

Joseph Drury

Offers a new theory of the novel
Explores how technology and machinery inspired the eighteenth-century British novel
Highlights the impacts and ambiguities of machines and mechanisms in Enlightenment culture
Features readings of works by Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Ann Radcliffe

Novel Machines

Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain

Joseph Drury

Description

Eighteenth-century fiction is full of mechanical devices and contrivances: Robinson Crusoe uses his gun and compass to master his island and its inhabitants; Tristram Shandy's conception is interrupted by a question about a clock and he has his nose damaged at birth by a man-midwife's forceps; Ann Radcliffe's gothic heroines play musical instruments to soothe their troubled minds. In Novel Machines, however, Joseph Drury argues that the most important machine in any eighteenth-century novel is the narrative itself. Like other kinds of machine, a narrative is an artificial construction composed of different parts that combine to produce a sequence of causally linked actions. Like other machines, a narrative is designed to produce predictable effects and can therefore be put to certain uses. Such affinities had been apparent to critics since Aristotle, but they began to assume a particular urgency in the eighteenth century as authors sought to organize their narratives according to the new ideas about nature, art, and the human subject that emerged out of the Scientific Revolution.

Reading works by Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Ann Radcliffe, Novel Machines tracks the consequences of the effort to transform the novel into an Enlightenment machine. On the one hand, the rationalization of the novel's narrative machinery helped establish its legitimacy, such that by the end of the century it could be celebrated as a modern 'invention' that provided valuable philosophical knowledge about human nature. On the other hand, conceptualizing the novel as a machine opened up a new line of attack for the period's moralists, whose polemics against the novel were often framed in the same terms used to reflect on the uses and effects of machines in other contexts. Eighteenth-century novelists responded by adapting the novel's narrative machinery, devising in the process some of the period's most characteristic and influential formal innovations.

Novel Machines

Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain

Joseph Drury

Introduction
1. Narratives and Machines in Enlightenment Britain
2. Libertines and Machines in Love in Excess
3. Realism's Ghosts: Science and Spectacle in Tom Jones
4. The Speed of Tristram Shandy
5. The Machine in the Ghost: Sounds and Sensibility in The Mysteries of Udolpho
Coda: The Novel and the Industrial Revolution

Novel Machines

Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain

Joseph Drury

Author Information

Joseph Drury, Associate Professor of English, Villanova University

Joseph Drury is Associate Professor of English at Villanova University. He completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and has published articles in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

Novel Machines

Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain

Joseph Drury

Reviews and Awards

"Novel Machines stands to energize the literary history of the novel in large part because it is not limited to the familiar critiques of deleterious social and moral effects of modern convenience." -- Sara Landreth, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

"Joseph Drury finds that the rising novel not only registered the impact of emergent mechanical technologies but also actively participated in machine labor of epistemological, social, and cultural transformation. Drury singles out popular tropes and instruments of mechanical and technical device (plot machinery, narrative vehicles) and shows how these double as self-reflexive commentary and participatory critiques of emergent knowledge forms and the scientific mechanisms that produced and promoted them." -- Jayne Lewis, Studies in English Literature

"This is interrogative writing of the highest calibre; every chapter questions master narratives of the novel, barely a page goes by without an insight into the literature of the Enlightenment, and the result is a fascinating exploration of the period's narrative strategies and how they respond to technological change ... It is a stimulating approach, and will provide engaging reading for all those interested in the novel, technology, and the relationship between the two." -- Chris Ewers, British Society for Literature and Science

"Drury offers rich, thick readings that both persuade one to view these fictions in new ways and suggest possibilities for reinvigorating the practice of formal critical analysis. It is rare to find a book that offers an angle of study as boldly fresh as this one does, and it is equally satisfying to find this done so well as Drury has managed it. ... Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." -- Choice