History and the Early English Novel : Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe

Robert Mayer explores the meaning of 'history' in the seventeenth century and shows how the narratives of Daniel Defoe, unlike those of Aphra Behn, were read in their own time as history. Mayer's study makes an important contribution to the debate about the origins of the modern novel in Britain.

This new study of the origins of the English novel argues that the novel emerged from historical writing. Examining historical writers and forms frequently neglected by earlier scholars, Robert Mayer shows that in the seventeenth century historical discourse embraced not only 'history' in its modern sense, but also fiction, polemic, gossip, and marvels. Mayer thus explains why Defoe's narratives were initially read as history. It is the acceptance of the claims to historicity, the study argues, that differentiates Defoe's fictions from those of writers like Thomas Deloney and Aphra Behn, important writers who nevertheless have figured less prominently than Defoe in discussions of the novel. Mayer ends by exploring the theoretical implications of the history-fiction connection. His study makes an important contribution to the continuing debate about the emergence of what we now call the novel in Britain in the eighteenth century.