The Story of Fictional Truth: Realism from the Death to the Rise of the Novel by Paul Dawson, and: The Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels by Yoon Sun Lee (review)

• Published in: Eighteenth - Century Studies Vol. 57; no. 4; p. 553
• Main Author: Bartoszyńska, Katarzyna
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.07.2024
• Subjects: History; Literary characters; Novels; Objectivity; Reading; Realism; Science
• ISSN: 0013-2586; 1086-315X
• DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2024.a931698

Though extremely different from each other in many ways, Yoon Sun Lee's The Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels and Paul Dawson's The Story of Fictional Truth: Realism from the Death to the Rise of the Novel are similar in the way they use close readings to challenge our understanding of basic truisms about aspects of narrative and their relationship to each other: plot, setting, and character; narratorial intrusion and verisimilitude; the first- and third-person voice. The second is to call into question the gloss I provided above, the one that suggests plot can be seen independently from the rest of the text. Because plot depends on the idea of an external world where events happen, it produces the illusion of that world as separate from itself. [...]Fielding and Richardson, in charting the trajectories of their characters, also typify them, producing a sense of constraint (these kinds of people do these kinds of things, and vice versa). The final chapter continues this investigation of subjective distortion in relation to plot, but also marks an endpoint in a longer process of development that the book sketches, where laws of history take the place of natural science.