![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Moreover, it is just such analytical rigidity that presupposes and reproduces a ‘personal’ sphere of subjective experience that is somehow outside the known institutions, formations and positions that comprise the social: that defines the personal and subjective as ‘all that escapes or seems to escape from the fixed and the explicit and the known’. Williams’s approach to the novel resists the habitual past tense of the analysis of social processes that fixes them in whole, completed forms, such that living presence is obscured. The novel emerges in this period as a mode of social practice, which mediates between dominant social forms - gender and class as much as the Gothic genre and Romanticism, for instance - and what is active, alive, in process, the immediate feeling and experience of social existence. Williams’s point here (made at length elsewhere in his study) is that novels are not simply indexes of social change, crude historical weathervanes, but a form of social change – literally, the novel form. The task left for us today is to ‘see what this is, and some ways of relating it to the new and unprecedented civilisation in which it took shape’. What was emerging, at least in part, was the novel: ‘a new kind of consciousness’. In his classic study of The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence (1970), Raymond Williams wonders what was emerging in England between 18 during the prodigious 20 months which saw the publication of Dombey and Son, Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, Mary Barton, Tancred, Town and Country and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. ![]()
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