By his own account, Arthur Miller's admiration for the classical Greek dramatists began with his earliest efforts at playwriting, when he was a student at the University of Michigan. “When I began to write,” he has said in an interview, “one assumed inevitably that one was in the mainstream that began with Aeschylus and went through about twenty-five hundred years of playwriting.” Asked in 1966 which playwrights he admired most when he was young, he replied, “first the Greeks, for their magnificent form, the symmetry. Half the time I couldn't really repeat the story because the characters in the mythology were completely blank to me. I had no background at that time to know really what was involved in these plays, but the architecture was clear. . . That form has never left me; I suppose it just got burned in”(Martin, Theater Essays, pp. 265-66). He has written in his autobiography Timebends that, once he began to write plays and “confront dramatic problems”himself, he “read differently than [he] had before, in every period of Western drama” (p. 232).

In the following essay I will pursue the theory of prose fiction by attending to the emergent theory of the novel. The theory of a genre in the process of coming into being is discovered in unpredictable places, many of them extra-‘literary’. During the first half of our period, the theory of the novel appears in a variety of discourses in which the epistemology of fiction is being treated, and often in the interstices of narrative itself. Later on, novel theory ceases to be so commonly embedded in practice itself because it is being separated out and institutionalized within the discourse of the periodical review. I will draw upon these several sources in order to suggest the expansive character of a theory whose terms have not yet been securely formulated.

For those who take the novel to be an ancient form given new life in the eighteenth century, the history both of prose fiction and of its theory in this period will cohere as the complicating development of what is none the less a familiar and continuous genre. Contemporaries, however, tended not to see things this way. For them, the novelty of the novel was an essential feature of the form - hence its theory and its poetics (the rules for composing novels) were at best uncertain. This meant different things to different people. In some it aroused apprehension: ‘I know not whether [the] novel, like the epopee, has any rules, peculiar to itself. If it has, I may have innocently erred against them all …’

Do women have the right to criticize? Throughout the eighteenth century it was commonly held that literary judgement was – or should be – a privilege reserved for men. A woman who set forth literary opinions in public exposed either her folly or her presumption. Women, according to Jonathan Swift, were the ‘ill-judging Sex’, inclined, like Echo, to take more delight in repeating ‘offensive Noise’ than in celebrating Philomela's song. Henry Fielding, playing the role of ‘Censor’ to the ‘great Empire of Letters’ in the Covent-Garden Journal, debarred all ‘fine Ladies’ from admission to the lofty ‘Realms of Criticism’. Women, he averred, spoke only a debased critical language, a repetitious modern lingo composed of the phrases, ‘sad Stuff, low Stuff, mean Stuff, vile Stuff, dirty Stuff, and so-forth’. They were ‘Gothic’ marauders in the republic of letters, usurping authority ‘without knowing one Word of the ancient Laws, and original Constitution of that Body of which they have professed themselves to be Members’. In the 1750s Oliver Goldsmith and Tobias Smollett took turns reviling Isabella Griffiths, the wife of Ralph Griffiths, who had dared to emend Goldsmith's works and publish reviews of her own in her husband's Monthly Review. Smollett boasted that his own journal, the Critical Review, was free of the depredations of ‘old women’ like Griffiths, whom he dismissed, with palpable sexual disgust, as the ‘Antiquated Female Critic’. In 1769, when Elizabeth Montagu published her only critical work, The Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, James Boswell worried aloud about resentment which might be aroused by a woman ‘intruding herself into the chair of criticism’ and was eager to defend his mentor Samuel Johnson against charges of prejudice against his bluestocking rival.

No English historian at the time of the Restoration would ever have prophesied that a century later one of his successors would be bold enough to proclaim: ‘History is the most popular species of writing’. Nor could he have foreseen that, in the words of Hume, Britain would become ‘the historical nation’. On the contrary, he might have been inclined to think that France or Italy with their Oratorians, their Benedictines, their Jansenists and their long tradition of scholarship would be more likely to distinguish themselves in the field. Besides, in England and elsewhere in Europe, the drama was favoured above all other species of writing, and booksellers had not yet created the conditions which were to make history what it is now, one of the very few literary genres that finds its way on to railway bookstalls. The Restoration historian, like so many historians before and since, made the wrong guess about the future because, with all his knowledge of the past, he could not free himself from the present.

In seventeenth-century England, an antiquarian might write about long-forgotten events and a statesman in disgrace might relate the history of his life and times. What they had in common was their love of the past, their scholarly turn of mind, their common preoccupation with documents; but society did not consider them as belonging to the same walk of life and they attached their loyalties to different milieus. Most highly distinguished among them all were the King's historiographers in France and in England.

The proliferation, dissolution, and crossing of genres

The poetry produced during the middle and later eighteenth century confronts us with an impressive formal and thematic diversity. Simply listing some of the more influential verse published in England during the 1740s will indicate the protean situation: Collins's Persian Eclogues (1742) and Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects (1746); Pope's New Dunciad, Robert Blair's The Grave, and Hammond's Love Elegies (all 1743); Akenside's The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) and Odes (1745); Joseph Warton's The Enthusiast: or The Lover of Nature (1744-8) and Odes on Various Subjects (1746); Young's Night Thoughts (1742-5); the final edition of Thomson's The Seasons (1746) and The Castle of Indolence (1748); Thomas Warton's The Pleasures of Melancholy and Gray's Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (both 1747); Shenstone's The School-Mistress (1748); Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749). The first edition of Robert Dodsley's A Collection of Poems, by Several Hands in 1748 is in itself a demonstration of generic profusion as well as authorial range. The influence of Pope and Augustan satire is still evident alongside the newer poetry of Akenside, Collins, the Wartons, Gray, Mason, Shenstone; there are satires, epigrams, and verse epistles as well as hymns, odes, and elegies. The success of Dodsley's collection in its first and subsequent editions testifies to a remarkably flexible, eclectic mid-century readership. On the continent, neo-classical preferences sustained their predominance somewhat longer and more pervasively, but there too poetry was moving towards generic variety and crossing.

The theory and criticism of neo-classical drama at its height had been based on principles of generic purity and exclusiveness; the three dramatic genres, tragedy, comedy and pastoral together were held to provide a complete picture of human life in its three forms; the life of the court, the life of the town and the life of the country (d'Aubignac, Pratique, p. 142). Such notions, which had previously been subject to only isolated questioning, came increasingly under fire during the earlier part of the eighteenth century and, from 1740 onwards, the overriding tendency was towards convergence rather than distinction of the genres. As the aristocratic court societies were confronted by an increasingly self-confident urban bourgeoisie, the theatre, the most public of literary media, became increasingly exposed to the demands of a social group looking for the serious treatment of its own values and feelings, and rinding its spokesmen as much among the theorists and critics of drama as among the practising dramatists. Initially the debate took place with reference to the definitions provided by Aristotle, which earlier commentators had taken to refer to the social status of the participants in the drama. Only with the emergence of a new historicist aesthetics in the 1770s did the absolute validity of the Aristotelian model come to be called in question; this signalled the end of one line of dramatic criticism and opened the way for a bolder and more innovative approach to drama than had been adopted in the eighteenth century.

Personally, the 1980s were stable years for Arthur Miller. Sixty-five when the decade began, Miller had long since established himself as a, if not the, major figure in the American theatre. Having returned to playwriting in 1964 with After the Fall, a play that may well have helped him come to terms with his first two marriages and the suicide of his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, the Miller of the 1980s shared a comfortable life in Roxbury, Connecticut, with his third wife, Inge Morath, a professional photographer who co-produced three handsome travel accounts with her husband: In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters Miller had purchased the Roxbury farm during his marriage to Monroe, but he seldom used the residence until he married Morath. By the 1980s, the couple had raised a daughter there and sent the young Rebecca to Yale. Miller, who, like Willy Loman, longed to work with his hands, found the eighteenth-century frame house a hospitable setting for his hobby, which, since the age of six, was carpentry.

The rise of periodical literature changed the face of criticism between 1660 and 1800. The genres and publishing vehicles that came to dominate critical discourse by 1800, particularly review criticism and the review journal, would have been all but unrecognizable to Dryden and his contemporaries. The impact of journalism on critical practice, and on its underlying principles, was broad and complex. It introduced new, more accessible forums for critical discussion; it multiplied and diversified the opportunities for critical expression; it fostered new critical values, drew attention to new literary genres, systematized the treatment of established ones, and expanded the audience for criticism. Its impact was felt by authors, readers, and publishers, as well as institutions ranging from scholarly libraries to rural reading societies; in subtler ways it affected canon formation, reception history, the emergence of affective criticism, the assimilation of foreign influences, the segregation of ‘women's literature’, and ultimately the politics of culture.

Because of the sheer mass and complexity of material involved in the history of journalism, this chapter will focus primarily on major patterns in English critical history, with intermittent attention to the parallel developments elsewhere in Europe. In tandem with the growth of print culture generally, the rapid expansion of the periodical press was a pan-European phenomenon. Scholars differ on definitions and methods of counting, but by any measure there was a dramatic increase in the number of periodicals between 1660 and 1800. In England political upheaval and various licensing acts caused erratic shifts during the seventeenth century – three periodicals in print during 1641, then fifty-nine in 1642, for example, or thirty-four in 1660 and then seven in 1661 – but the average of five periodicals per year from 1661 to 1678 grew to twenty-five titles by 1700, ninety in 1750, and 264 in 1800.

First performed as a one-act play in 1955, Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge was later rewritten and restaged as a full-length, two-act play. Miller's Introduction to the second version comments on both the expansion of the play and its source. Of the latter, Miller remarks: “I had known the story of A View from the Bridge for a long time. A water-front worker who had known Eddie's prototype told it to me. I had never thought to make a play of it because it was too complete, there was nothing I could add.” In Timebends, his autobiography, Miller speaks at length of his interest in the Brooklyn waterfront and of his relationship with Vincent James “Vinny” Longhi, whom he describes as “a new member of the bar with political ambitions.” Longhi and Longhi's friend, Mitch Berenson, sought out Miller to help them make known and keep alive the work of Pete Panto, a young longshoreman who had earned a gangland execution for attempting to foment a revolt against the union leadership of Joseph Ryan, the corrupt and probably Mafia-affiliated then head of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA).

The story of German idealism is the story of Kant and the aftermath. By aftermath I mean the Aufhebung of critical philosophy in the speculative idealisms of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The latter, of course, took himself to be the Aufhebung of Fichte and Schelling as well as Kant, to say nothing of Plato and Aristotle, Anselm and Aquinas, Descartes and Spinoza, and so forth.

The gods are jealous and do not tolerate such hubris. So German idealism involves a second aftermath, this time with Hegel rather than Kant as the subject of simultaneous critique (cancellation) and appropriation (preservation). Speculation, mediation, reconciliation, and the Idea are names by which Hegel designates a single strategy for trumping the tradition and becoming its fulfillment. The most unkindest cut of all for Hegel was to be himself out-trumped by Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard. The various ways in which his massive Aufhebung was aufgehoben in the 1840s make up one of the most fascinating stories in the history of philosophy.

Kierkegaard is a major figure in this story; he is one of the great anti-Hegelians. There are other illuminating ways to read his writings. He is a religious thinker in the Augustinian tradition. As such he is also an existentialist, a postmodernist, and a critical social theorist. But each of these stories will have to include an account of his complex relation to Hegel. The relation is complex precisely because it is an Aufhebung. There is appropriation as well as negation, and Kierkegaard is never simply anti-Hegelian.

Has it ever occurred to you, dear reader, to entertain just a little doubt concerning the well-known principle that the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer? Well, frankly, this doubt has not plagued the present author so very much. Or at least a historian cannot be nearly as much a doubter on this score as Victor Eremita, opening his editorial remarks in Either/Or, would seem to want him to be.

Let us consider the following examples. On 19 October 1855, when he lay dying in Frederik's Hospital, Søren Kierkegaard had a caller. It was his brother, the theologian and pastor Peter Christian Kierkegaard, later a bishop and briefly a cabinet minister. Peter had traveled from his parish at Pedersborg-by-Søro in west-central Zealand, in those days a considerable journey. Søren refused to receive his brother, who went home the next day. That same day Søren admitted his friend Emil Boesen for a visit. Boesen asked him if he wished to receive the Eucharist. “Yes,” answered Kierkegaard, “but from a layman, not a pastor.” Boesen protested that this would be difficult to arrange. “Then I will die without it.” Gerkegaard explained his position by stating that “pastors are civil servants of the Crown - they have nothing to do with Christianity.”

Irony ranks high among Kierkegaard's enduring philosophical preoccupations. His writing career may be said to begin with his most sustained explicit treatment of the subject, his university thesis On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates. This was, as it turned out, far from his last word on the subject. Although he never again essayed a comprehensive theoretical account of irony, the subject recurs as a topic of discussion throughout his authorship, often accompanied by supporting references (or at least allusions) to the thesis. Even more pervasive than his remarks on irony is his employment of it, and of other varieties of verbal indirectness. Precisely how many, and which, of the utterances in Kierkegaard's texts should be taken as ironical (or in some way indirect) is a matter of considerable controversy - a controversy that has naturally intensified with the entry of poststructuralist critics onto the field of Kierkegaard interpretation. But one need not share the views of self-described postmodernists or poststructuralists to regard it as a truism that any adequate reading of Kierkegaard must confront both his announced views on irony and other modes of indirect discourse, and his highly deliberate and self-conscious employment of such modes.

Writing on war did not begin with the twentieth century. Far from it: the whole tradition of epic can be defined as, precisely, literature of war. Nevertheless it is only in our own century that it has expanded to become a major genre. There are of course nineteenth-century antecedents in French: best known, La Chartreuse de Parme, where Stendhal takes Fabrice del Dongo on a gratuitous excursion to Waterloo. But these pages, famous though they are, amount to less than a tenth of a very long novel. Zola's La Débâcle (1892) is the most important individual nineteenth-century novel devoted to the theme of war, taking in its sweep both the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune which followed. La Débâcle has acted as a seminal work, since many of the typical incidents of First- and Second-World-War narratives appear, if only in embryo, in its pages, together with the dominant theme of war as confusion, a humiliating shambles. And at the same time as presenting the war as experienced by individual characters, Zola succeeds in incorporating into his fiction a bird's eye survey of the conflict, almost from a historian's viewpoint, in a way no writer was to emulate until Jules Romains in the late 1930s. His description of the shattering defeat of the French armies at the hands of the Prussians prefigures, precisely, the even greater debacle of May-June 1940.

Some questions are perennial, forever reemerging in textbooks when the debate is highly abstract but occasionally changing history when someone acts dramatically on conviction. Think of Socrates asking “What can we know?” and being willing to drink the hemlock, or of Jesus asking “Who should we love?” and being willing to stretch his body on a cross. A third enduring question - “Are we meaningfully free?” - is the chief focus of this essay. I do not expect to settle the ancient debate about freedom of the will, but I do hope to situate it theologically by critically examining Søren Kierkegaard's views in light of some significant precursors. Kierkegaard worries about how to balance the contingency and fallibility of human deliberation and choice with the indispensability and reliability of divine providence, but he does not treat these matters abstractly or in isolation. He is too Socratic for mere abstraction about human freedom; indeed, his fully Christian understanding is highly dramatic (even paradoxical) at times, in an effort to be true to lived complexity.

'Popular' literature is valued because it gives direct access to the collective heartbeat. Cultural historians, formalists (who seek out its structures) and psycho-sociologists look to it to reveal the permanence of the communal experience. But literature which is popular has properties which, though definable, are too elusive to take any single shape. Cinderella, Robin Hood and Robinson Crusoe are all popular in different ways. The first is a folk myth sired by a Darwinian process of survival. The second is a folk hero shaped by anonymous hands out of a real life. The third is a character in a book written by an individual. Nineteenth-century France was familiar with all three types. 'Bonhomme Misère' - Poverty - survived in the cheap tracts hawked by pedlars known as littérature de colportage; Napoleon was turned into a new Charlemagne; and d'Artagnan was a legend in his creator's lifetime. But after 1800, popular literature began to acquire a new common denominator: it was transmitted by the printed page. No longer expressed by word of myth, it resumed its career in created fictions.

When are we in despair? Is it when we find ourselves powerless to grasp or retain some salient good? Or when it seems nothing can be done to prevent our world collapsing? Or when the running out of possibilities has left us now paralyzed? What exactly is despair? Is it the experience itself, the sheer sense of hopelessness? Or is despair what our lives are thenceforth “in” once what we so “desperately” want proves beyond reach? Habits or rules of language give us no clear answers here, but psychology may help. It seems clear that any lingering sense of frustration and hopelessness assumes some continued but problematic interest in the salient good once hoped for, or now lost.