(RE)VALUING THE NOVEL: MICHAEL McKEON’S
(RE)VALUING THE NOVEL: MICHAEL McKEON’S

Summary/Abstract: The present article aims to analyse Michael Mckeon’s Preface to his controversial Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740, in an effort to underline both the similarities with, and especially, the departure from, his predecessor Ian Watt. Marxist in his approach, McKeon delves into the “origins” of the English novel by making use of the dialectical method understood as a tight relation between parts and wholes, able to revalue the novel historically, culturally and sociologically. Special attention will be paid to the way in which the novel, as a cultural document of intellectual history, becomes a fully-fledged genre by processing apparently “non-historical things” (cf. McKeon) which, once “melted” in the realistic discourse of the novel, tend to be dismissed and treated as historical residues. Moreover, our analysis resorts to cultural theory, such as Foucault’s petit histories, New Historicism’s anecdotes or la longue durée proposed by L’Ėcole des Annales, in order to better grasp the meaning of such nonhistorical things mirrored in the novel, and endeavours to demonstrate that, in light of the above said, McKeon’s contribution to novel theory is a kind of “anthropological” approach whose merit is to provide the readers information on the fundamentals, the construction, production and dynamics of the eighteenth-century English novel seen as an ideological construct.

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