SAMUEL H. MONK, _University of Minnesota_
ERNEST MOSSNER, _University of Texas_
JAMES SUTHERLAND, _University College, London_
H.T. SWEDENBERG, JR., _University of California, Los Angeles_




INTRODUCTION


The development of the English novel is one of the triumphs of the
eighteenth century. Criticism of prose fiction during that period,
however, is less impressive, being neither strikingly original nor
profound nor usually more than fragmentary. Because the early
statements of theory were mostly very brief and are now obscurely
buried in rare books, one may come upon the well conceived "program"
of _Joseph Andrews_ and _Tom Jones_ with some surprise. But if one
looks in the right places one will realize that mid-eighteenth
century notions about prose fiction had a substantial background in
earlier writing. And as in the case of other branches of literary
theory in the Augustan period, the original expression of the
organized doctrine was French. In Georges de Scudéry's preface to
_Ibrahim_ (1641)[1] and in a conversation on the art of inventing a
"Fable" in Book VIII (1656) of his sister Madeleine's _Clélie_ are
to be found the grounds of criticism in prose fiction; practically
all the principles are here which eighteenth-century theorists
adopted, or seemed to adopt, or from which they developed, often by
the simple process of contradiction, their new principles.