Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain

Eighteenth-century fiction is full of mechanical devices and contrivances: Robinson Crusoe uses his gun and compass to master his island and its inhabitants; Tristram Shandy’s conception is interrupted by a question about a clock and he has his nose damaged at birth by a man-midwife’s forceps; Ann Radcliffe’s gothic heroines play musical instruments to soothe their troubled minds. By contrast, Novel Machines argues that the most important machine in any eighteenth-century novel is the narrative itself, when authors sought to organize their narratives according to the new ideas about nature, art, and the human subject that emerged out of the Scientific Revolution. Reading works by Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Ann Radcliffe, Novel Machines tracks the consequences of the effort to transform the novel into an Enlightenment machine, and explores how eighteenth-century novelists adapted the novel’s narrative machinery, devising in the process some of the period’s most characteristic and influential formal innovations.