Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel

Roger Maioli is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Florida, USA. He holds a PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University and an MA in English Literary Studies from the University of São Paulo. In addition to articles in SEL, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and The Shandean, he authored the first Brazilian translation of Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews.

• Introduction.- 1. Maps of Worlds Unseen.- 2. David Hume and the Empiricist Challenge.- 3. Empiricism and Fielding’s Theory of Fiction.- 4. Varieties of Propositionalism.- 5. Laurence Sterne and the Experience of Reading Fiction.- Conclusion.- Works Cited.- Index.-

“Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel explores the impact of the empirical turn in philosophy on how imaginative writing could be justified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. … Maioli’s conclusion demonstrates how eighteenth-century novel theory prefigures modern arguments about the value of the humanities. … It is a thought-provoking end to a thoroughly engaging book.” (Gillian Skinner, The BARS Review, Issue 52, 2018)“Maioli’s book takes us back to eighteenth-century debates about the capacity for literature to teach us anything meaningful about the empirical world. … the value of Maioli’s book is that it ensures that we continue to think about why literature is valuable in a world in which it seems that value can never be taken for granted.” (Peter DeGabriele, Modern Philology, Vol. 116 (02), June, 2018)