Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction by Eric Rothstein reconceives the “rules” of the novel not as prescriptive poetics but as interacting systems—of narrative order and epistemological inquiry—shared by five famously unlike works: Rasselas, Tristram Shandy, Humphry Clinker, Amelia, and Caleb Williams. Rejecting eighteenth-century critics’ elusive search for universal principles, Rothstein demonstrates how techniques such as analogy, modification, surrogacy, and incremental repetition generate coherence while sustaining variety, aligning formal pattern with the novels’ central concern: how one knows in a world governed by probability rather than certitude. The result is a historically grounded account in which Fielding, Johnson, Smollett, Sterne, and Godwin articulate cognate strategies for managing perspective, character, and causation—without collapsing their singular achievements into a single “ought.”

Rothstein’s method pairs close modeling of each novel’s internal logic with a crisp intellectual genealogy—from Locke and Hartley to Butler and Hume—showing how Enlightenment debates over “esprit de système,” empiricism, and analogy inform narrative design. By tracing how readerly inference and character judgment are orchestrated through patterned variation, the book offers critics a powerful vocabulary for explaining why these fictions feel both rigorously shaped and provocatively open. Scholars of eighteenth-century literature, narrative theory, and the history of ideas will find here a compelling framework that clarifies the kinship among diverse forms—sentimental, epistolary, picaresque, Gothic—while sharpening our sense of what the period’s novels can (and cannot) make knowable.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.