institution of the English novel: Defoe's contribution, The

For Scott, what makes Defoe realistic is his lack of coherent "story." Defoe will introduce such characters as Robinson's older brother and never mention him again or set up lines of action that lead nowhere and to no effect. Again, a notion similar to Watt's argument: Defoe's novels have little plot or "story," which is good; Fielding's novels have too much form or plot, which is bad. It is as if the distinction between romance and novel could be measured by shades of degree between motivated action and form and lack of it, in which case, the romance form could never be completely avoided. The story of the disenchantment of romance for a protagonist such as Edward Waverley is still a romance. In summary of his praise of Austen, Scott uses a curiously durable and iterable analogy:

The author's knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters that the reader cannot fail to recognize, reminds us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting. The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader. (235)

You will, of course, recognize in this model, the very same one which George Eliot uses in Adam Bede to describe her own realism (implicitly attacking the romantic fictions of Dickens). Scott also used it to praise Defoe. Although no two novelists probably seem less alike than Defoe and Austen to modern readers, Scott was not the only reader to associate them with each other.

The question that remains is not whether the newly constituted eighteenthcentury novel influenced (overtly or covertly) the development of the English novel as a genre in the nineteenth century, but how and by what (constantly changing) rules of inclusion and exclusion the formation of its institution took place and is still taking place and legitimacy was given to individual texts of this species. Since the word canon means rod of measurement, what is the canon of this canon? As I shall try to show, Scott has already provided some clues as to the basis on which canonization takes place. I will also suggest the role played by the continually marginal Defoe in this process.

: III.