중산층 등장과 소설의 발생 : 이완 와트의 소설발생론에 대한 비판

The Rising Middle Class and the Rise of the Novel : Reading against Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel

Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel has been hailed as a very important canon. His tbeory that the novel originated in England in modern times has been considered a classical theory. Most theorists, including those who deny the English origin of the novel, seem to accept his premise that there is a correlation between the rising middle class and the rise of the novel. This essay tries to read against The Rise of the Novel, to criticize the contextual aspect of its argument, that is, the close interrelationship between the rise of the novel and the rise of the middle class. The origin of the genre goes back to the low-middle class in the ancient Greek-Roman period. My major argument is that Watt's concept of the middle class is really the high-middle class, which is in fact a ruling class. English high middle class, therefore, lack the impulse required to create the novel self-consciously Watt subordinates the rise of the novel to the laissez-faire economical laws, and his theory stands upon a shaky assumption that the reading public was largely composed of the middle-class owing to their high literacy. After the seventeenth century, the low-middle class including women enjoyed reading novels reflecting their desires and lives, which were not so different from those written in the ancient ages. The rising middle class had tried to control the theme and contents of those novels according to their Protestant standard. Watt erroneously called this tendency "the rise of the novel" Their only concern was to dominate and regulate the genre with their Protestant standard.