British Historical Fiction before Scott
Literary historians have been out to dethrone (or, at least, decenter) Sir Walter Scott for some time, either by pointing out how much his work derives from earlier genres such as the national tale or the Gothic, or by noting that there have been historical novels since we've had novels [1]. Nevertheless, Scott's wide-ranging international influence means that questions about his originality are in tension with his indisputable cultural centrality. What's different about Scott, in other words? Or is there a difference?
In British Historical Fiction before Scott, Anne H. Stevens reconstructs the explosion of interest in historical tales in the eighteenth-century literary marketplace. Her book attempts to put Franco Moretti's arguments for "distant reading" into practice (13): instead of doing extended close readings, she lists, classifies, and tracks genre characteristics across large groups of texts. She studies how historical novels were distributed in circulating library catalogs and spends a chapter on how book reviewers established the norms for and prestige (or lack thereof) of the emergent genre. In addition, Stevens borrows from film theory by adapting the concept of "generic cycle" to literary history. The generic cycle identifies how, through a "series of imitations" (22), recognizable cinematic genres or subgenres emerge: a film comes out, makes a financial splash, is carefully studied by production companies, and after trial and error, a "formula" eventually coalesces. Thus, Stevens uses the generic cycle to analyze how the categories of "Gothic" and "historical fiction" emerged over the course of the eighteenth century, given that the two forms frequently overlapped in practice (a point that has been made in various forms by Ian Duncan, Fiona Robertson, and James Watt, among others). Novelists and publishers noted that the innovative works by Thomas Leland and Horace Walpole sold well; sought to imitate and/or revise them; and, eventually, arrived at specific generic characteristics (both of form and content) that appealed to popular tastes. Furthermore, she argues, book reviewers proved instrumental in sorting out core characteristics, forcing authors to wax more attentive to historical accuracy (sort of) or, at least, more self-aware of deviations from same (e.g., 144). And eighteenth-century reviewers were already anxious about what would be one of the core debates over historical fiction in the nineteenth century: the "worry about young readers [and adult ones, we could add] obtaining inaccurate information about historical events and figures through fictions" (131).
Some of Stevens' arguments have wider applications. In particular, her study of circulating library catalogs demonstrates that "there is a very strong correlation between the most prevalent books in circulating libraries, those that can be found in catalogs a decade or two after their publication, and those that have been reprinted in the modern era." That is, "the process of canon-formation, sorting out the novelistic canon from the mass of novels that are doomed to be forgotten, happens fairly quickly and decisively" (73). Given longstanding debates about canon-formation in literary studies, this is an interesting point--but also, perhaps, one in need of further clarification. It's not clear, for example, whose canon this is: Sophia Lee's The Recess drops out of sight by the mid-19th c., only to be revived for specialist audiences by first Arno Press and then the UP of Kentucky "Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women" series. Of the other authors she suggests were canonized by the 1830s, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth remained readily available from initial publication until the present, whereas William Godwin and Lady Morgan were only resuscitated after academic tastes changed, Jane Porter very recently (sort of), and Jane West not at all (although if somebody wanted to produce a critical edition of The Loyalists, I'd hardly object). It might be more accurate to suggest that the initial phase of canon-formation happens very early, but that there's an ongoing shakeout; I've previously suggested that you see quite rapid changes in critical estimation around the century mark, whether affirming or disavowing. Early Everyman's Library catalogs, for example, contain all sorts of now-forgotten things. (And, of course, critical reputations and sales frequently go through a rising and falling motion in the first couple of decades after an author's death--the Brontes, for example.)
By the end of the book, Stevens has convincingly demonstrated that Scott "was writing within a certain tradition with a built-in audience and certain generic expectations" (122). Although the epilogue on Scott's Ivanhoe establishes how he invoked, reworked, and satirized those expectations, though, it doesn't establish how Scott became "Scott"--how, that is, he successfully became the model for future generic cycles. In part, this is because Stevens analyzes the novel and not its marketing, distribution, and reception history, all of which might go some ways beyond internal factors to explain how Scott, the Wizard of the North, waved his magic wand and made his predecessors vanish. One might also ask how sheer forgetfulness inadvertently helped make Scott into "Scott"--the reading public's memory is not always long. Overall, however, this is an extremely useful monograph, both for its analysis and the amount of research legwork involved (literary historians will like the charts a great deal).
[1] In addition to various articles by Peter Garside, see, e.g., Ina Ferris, The Achivement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991); Richard Maxwell, The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009); Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997). Tomas Hagg points out that "[i]t would not be altogether unreasonable to call some of the Greek novels of love, adventure, and travel 'historical novels.'" The Novel in Antiquity (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991), 125.