The Augustan Reprint Society
GENERAL EDITORS
ASSISTANT EDITOR
ADVISORY EDITORS
The development of the English novel is one of the triumphs of theeighteenth century. Criticism of prose fiction during that period,however, is less impressive, being neither strikingly original norprofound nor usually more than fragmentary. Because the earlystatements of theory were mostly very brief and are now obscurelyburied in rare books, one may come upon the well conceived "program"of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones with some surprise. But if onelooks in the right places one will realize that mid-eighteenthcentury notions about prose fiction had a substantial background inearlier writing. And as in the case of other branches of literarytheory in the Augustan period, the original expression of theorganized doctrine was French. In Georges de Scudéry's preface toIbrahim (1641)[1] and in a conversation on the art of inventing a"Fable" in Book VIII (1656) of his sister Madeleine's Clélie areto be found the grounds of criticism in prose fiction; practicallyall the principles are here which eighteenth-century theoristsadopted, or seemed to adopt, or from which they developed, often bythe simple process of contradiction, their new principles.
That many of the ideas in the preface to Ibrahim were not ne