For many scholars of the early novel, a distinctively new concern with place was accompanied by an unprecedentedly extensive attention to the temporal aspect of human existence: how people change over time, how one time differs from another. Although modern readers tend to take the time component in fiction for granted, “Shakespeare … had been dead for thirty years before the word ‘anachronism’ first appeared in English.” This was how Ian Watt argued that pre-novelistic literary forms prioritized what was understood as the timeless and universal over the time-bound and contingent, a hierarchy that the novel would completely reverse; Fielding had used an almanac to ensure historical accuracy in the treatment of 1745 (the year in which Tom Jones is set), while Richardson had meticulously dated Clarissa's letters as if to say that it matters when, very precisely, they were written. The novel's concern with human life in time and history is the subject of this chapter, which begins by looking at the panoramic and long-range historical novel and novel sequence, and ends by describing some of the important transformations of narrative time undertaken by twentieth-century writers.

History and story

The eighteenth-century critic James Beattie railed against how earlier romances conflated different historical modes for the sake of an exciting story: