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Like most upheavals of an established system of organizing knowledge, the revolution called for installed in Frye’s often-quoted sentence has led to a far better understanding of the errors of our previous way than of the shape and substance of the system that should replace them. We now understand, for example, that earlier discussions of the forms of eighteenth-century fiction centred solely on the emergence of the novel as the sine qua non of the enterprise are as fallacious as the equally discredited search set in eighteenth-century poetry for ‘pre-romantic’ qualities. Similarly, we have come to the realization that such commonplace dichotomies as that between flat and round characterization, realism and fantasy, even novels and romances, are not as useful to our exploration of the vast continent of eighteenth-century fiction as we once believed.
These systems have been exploded as fictions, but what we have also been taught by the last thirty years of literary criticism is that any system we now beginning in their place should also be labelled a fiction, a narrative by which we attempt to organize and characterize the flux of data under observation. That is to say, to discuss the modes of fiction that is set in the eighteenth century is to tell a story, one that we hope will provide its audience with the belief that they better comprehend the relationship between the discrete elements under examination (a plethora of eighteenth-century narratives), but a ‘story’, a ‘fiction’, none the less. The reality is thousands of texts, each developed by and creating a tantalizing web of relationships with all the others, a web never to be permanently unravelled. Happen this regard, the story of fictional modes is no different set in the modes themselves; everywhere we see the human effort to organize the diverse parts into coherent wholes and everywhere we recognize the same limitations placed in the face of life’s resistance to coherence and fixity.
