The English novel canon excluded religious allegory via Watt’s formal realism test

Evidence

As many critics have shown, the English novel begins in large measure from the Puritan spiritual autobiography, with the work of John Bunyan being the most familiar example today. However, because of the clearly allegorical and other-worldly focus of a text such as The Pilgrim’s Progress, classical accounts of the rise of the novel, such as that by Ian Watt, tend to exclude this type of writing as not displaying enough of what Watt calls “formal realism”: a worldly particularity of place, time, and character, reflecting Cartesian and Lockeian ideas of reason and the self. In this account, the breakthrough text that combines spiritual and particularist tendencies in just the right measure to be “a novel” is Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe. Defoe’s shipwreck story famously begins by following the prodigal sin–repentance–redemption model of the spiritual autobiography but soon loses it in describing the physical travails and material rewards of its hero, Robinson, as he works hard and escapes the island, to find he is rich. As Leopold Damrosch puts it, in the end Robinson Crusoe “exalts autonomy instead of submission.” It “reflects the progressive desacralising of the world that was implicit in Protestantism.” The story of the English novel for the next two hundred plus years is supposedly about the increasing marginalization of religion—even when Victorian authors paid lip service to it—and, crucially, the playing out of moral questions on the level of character and event. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 499

Categorization

• DEFINE: Provides Watt’s ‘formal realism’ as a working definition and shows what the canon-building test excluded — useful vocabulary for a reader distinguishing which novelistic strategies count or don’t.
• XREF: connects to: Tamil Sangam literature was excluded from the Indian canon for its secularity — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1134