"A Matter <i>Discutable</i>": <i>The Rise of the Novel</i>

As an undergraduate in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1950s, I think I never read a novel in a course unless one counts Gulliver's Travels or Rasselas, both of them included in chronological surveys of the eighteenth century, and somewhere along the way I must have read Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, though not in George Sherburn's course on the novel before 1800—because I didn't take it, notwithstanding my inclination to the eighteenth century. I doubt that I was unique in my indifference to the novel, and I know it was not because I had an especially greater aptitude for poetry or drama. Nor was it because I had any special aversion to the novel: I occupied one summer with The Magic Mountain. It was merely that at Harvard in the early 1950s the novel did not claim the attention it does now because it did not have the same canonical standing. I read Chaucer and Spenser and Milton and Romantic poetry, I read the triumvirate of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold; and I read twentiethcentury American poetry. I took drama from the beginning to the closing of the theatres and modern drama, including Chekhov and Strindberg and O'Neill. I wrote an honours essay on Swift's sermons. But it was graduate school before I took a seminar on the eighteenth-century novel, catching up on Sterne and Smollett and Goldsmith and being taught to dislike Richardson. I took a seminar on James, and I also caught up with Cooper and Melville and Hawthorne and the American naturalists. My undergraduate curriculum would now seem unusual if not perverse.