SOURCE: "Reconsidering the Late Eighteenth-Century Novel," in her Shifting Genres, Changing Realities: Reading the Late Eighteenth-Century Novel, Vol. 8 of The Age of Revolution and Romanticism: Interdisciplinary Studies, Peter Lang, 1995, pp. 1-15.

In this excerpt Fitzgerald discusses the nature of the novel and its relationships to other genres.

Novels of the late eighteenth century have, until recently, been largely ignored by twentieth-century scholars and critics. In the traditional view of the history of the novel that I learned as an undergraduate, there were the "Big Four" novelists—Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett—who "invented" the British novel in a remarkably short period of time. Daniel Defoe and Oliver Goldsmith merited some attention for Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, and The Vicar of Wakefield; they might therefore be regarded as alternate members of the "Big Four" Club. Then, nothing of note seemed to have happened until Jane Austen's novels miraculously appeared...