Conclusion

The conclusion shows that several of the embodied aspects of writing fiction discussed for the eighteenth-century novel can be traced into the nineteenth century through an example from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. It is shown that, like the earlier authors in the case studies in this book, Dickens features shifting embodied stances and involves elements of the media ecology of his day rather than deploying the concrete particulars that “formal realism” considers central to the novel. Links to larger arguments about the role of the novel in literary history are then drawn in contrast with accounts, based on Adorno/Habermas and Benjamin, that argue that eighteenth-century fiction becomes rationalised and disembodied with the novel and its culture industry. Rather than impoverishing experience, it is argued that the novel as a lifeworld technology depends profoundly on readers’ embodied engagements and that 4E cognition is a critical perspective that affords such an alternative take.

The Curse of Realism

This chapter challenges the assumption that throughout history the novel gets progressively better at realism and at matching its language in cognitive processes. It characterises this assumption as “the curse of realism,” which retroactively imposes standards from the nineteenth-century novel onto texts from earlier periods and evaluates them as lacking stylistic and narrative achievements that they never aimed for. A counter-model, based on embodied cognition and predictive, probabilistic cognition, is proposed. This allows cognitive approaches to literature to move away from a teleological perspective (where the novel improves its match with cognition) and towards a dialectic perspective (where literary texts can relate to cognition in ways that are not inherently more accurate than others). This chapter lays the overall theoretical foundations for the case studies in the following chapters.

Lennox: Repertoires of Embodiment

This chapter begins with a systematic comparison of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century styles of embodied language through versions of the same narrative in French and English. Lennox’s work as a cultural broker and translator aims not only to bring narratives rooted in the seventeenth century into her contemporary literary world but also to extend their repertoires of embodied language. In her translations, she integrates instances of inner and outer bodily perception and grounds direct speech in the characters’ bodies. With Lennox’s literary magazine The Lady’s Museum, it will be shown how the novel and its embodied style are embedded in a larger world of book learning. The relations that Lennox establishes between the serialised novel, short forms like the maxim, and educational treatises document an understanding of the role of the novel that differs from the indices and abridgements around Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa.

Fielding: A Lifeworld of Books

This chapter investigates how Sarah Fielding develops the kind of writing that leads readers to engage with the novel in a mode of reading that is both immersed and reflective. It traces this project through Fielding’s comments on novel reading in her critical writings, her translation of Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates, and her own experimental metafiction in the 1750s (also in collaboration with Jane Collier). Fielding, it is shown, brings novel reading and its immersive qualities into conversation with the debates between the ancients and the moderns and the transhistorical perspectives arising from the mock-heroic mode. Also the theatre, and in particular Fielding’s engagement with Shakespeare, is shown to contribute to her bid to create the kind of novel that can both immerse readers and make them think.

The Novel as a Lifeworld Technology

This chapter makes the proposal to conceive of the novel as a lifeworld technology. It bases this argument on the ways in which the eighteenth-century novel has been shown to integrate contemporary media (such as letters, books of maxims, the theatre and educational literature) into its narratives and to reflect on its workings, in particular through embodied uses of language and its modulations in literary style. Such aspects of the lifeworld technology are proposed to constitute the feeling of the “real” in the novel in the period. Beyond the historically situated analyses and arguments of the case studies, the notion of the novel as a lifeworld technology is also shown to open new conversations between literary studies based on 4E cognition, actor-network theory, media archeology and posthuman approaches.

Burney: Writing Life and Fiction

This chapter traces the interfaces between Frances Burney’s use of embodied language in her novels and her life-writing in journals and diaries. It considers how Burney inhabits a world of letters through her familiarity with poetry and plays (performed in amateur theatricals) and how this surfaces, in particular in her use of free indirect discourse, both in her life-writing and in her novels. Burney’s practice` of writing and editing is investigated through an analysis of the different stages of composition in the manuscripts for her tragedies. Burney’s reflection of conduct book writing and the emergent form of the Bildungsroman are related to how her encounter with Madame de Genlis features in her life-writing and in Camilla. Across life-writing and fiction, Burney keeps renegotiating the embodied style developed throughout the eighteenth century.

Haywood: Shaping a Fictional Language of Embodiment

This chapter traces how the eighteenth-century novel develops a language of emotional involvement and embodied intensity through the works of Eliza Haywood. It discusses Haywood’s early works in amatory fiction, her later reflections on the mid-century novel, and her translations from the French. Haywood’s works are related to the integration of letters in novel writing and to the context of the theatre, as this chapter works towards an account of embodied style that is embedded in contemporary media ecologies. In more general terms, models of embodiment in fiction are specified through the way in which these media differences give rise to stances in embodied writing and modulations of joint attention between readers and narrators that make the literary language of embodiment go beyond the mere simulation of bodily states.

Introduction: How the Novel Found Its Feet

The introduction presents an outline of 4E approaches to cognition and sketches how these approaches are brought to bear on developments in the eighteenth-century novel in this book. 4E cognition conceptualises cognition as embodied (as thinking is rooted in our bodies and their movement), embedded (as the mind/body connects to social environments and interactions with others), extended (as cognitive processes involve both the mind/body and material artefacts from the environment), and enactive (as perception depends on the body). The chapter briefly relates the contribution of this book to earlier work on literature from a 4E perspective in cognitive literary studies, as well as to the interest in materialism and book history in eighteenth-century studies.