One hundred years of Mormonism, a history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints from 1805 to 1905

As art, the novel realizes its equality with poetry, and prepares itself for entrance into the "Great Tradition" (Leavis's 1948 title) of Western literature. The idea of the novel as art means that novel studies, and literary histories of the novel, come to privilege the novel's "form." Claims for the novel's formal coherence are not fatal to the idea of the novel's realistic imitation of social or psychic life. Instead the two ideas work together in literary histories from Ernest Baker's ten-volume History of the English Novel to Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel (1957). For Ian Watt "formal realism" becomes the distinctive characteristic of the novel and the crucial invention necessary for its «rise» to being the most influential linguistic vehicle of subjective experience. With the idea of the novel's nationalism, its realism, and its power to express a personal interiority emerge three questions that have preoccupied scholarly study of the early British novel for at least one hundred years. Out of the concept of the novel's Englishness emerges a new question: how, where, and why does the English novel begin, originate, arise? This question is framed so as to assure that its answer will come from within the study of British culture ...»