A commonplace of French literary history holds that around 1660 an archaic novelistic form called the roman was suddenly replaced by the nouvelle, and that this replacement amounts to the birth of the novel in a modern sense. In this quantitative analysis, I tag of a sample of novels appearing between 1601 and 1730 for a variety of characteristics long said to distinguish romans from nouvelles (length, use of inset narratives, historical setting); I add the further variables of protagonist type (drawn from history or not) and truth posture (assertions of veracity and admissions of invention). Such analysis reveals that although romans do predominate in the first half of the century while nouvelles flourish in the second, 1660 cannot be confirmed as a threshold. In fact, far from being diametrically opposed, romans and nouvelles are in many respects merely different moments in the evolution of the same basic artifact, one to be eventually replaced by the first-person forms familiar from the eighteenth century. More broadly, a quantitative approach suggests that the novel’s history should be thought of less as a story of stability and rupture than as continual — but patterned — flux.

This chapter pursues a historical, methodological and theoretical agenda to interrogate the validity and value of identifying proto-novelistic writing in medieval French literature. Informed by Terence Cave’s reflections on ‘pre-liminaries’, it counters conventional positionings of the medieval period in histories of the novel in French, ensuring that it is not unduly omitted or disparaged whilst opposing unhelpfully evolutionary approaches. It first considers methodological challenges to adopting a fruitful retrospective gaze on medieval textuality, specifically problems of teleology and etymology. Focusing on the Old French roman and Middle French nouvelle as the genres most targeted as precursors in histories of the novel, it uncovers unexpected aspects of such points of comparison, especially in light of the modern novel’s and medieval romance’s shifting generic and formal histories. Selected elements of form (language, prose/verse, narrative structure, paratext) are examined to promote modern-medieval literary dialogue. A concluding case study of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century dit proposes a fresh approach to identifying what, in chronologically earlier texts, is beneficial to our thinking about the novel today, in terms of definitional boundaries, the literary representation of individual experience, and reflexivity – the ways storytelling reflects on its own modes and capacities of how to tell a tale.

This chapter backtracks to 1601, revealing that the vogue for novels said to be true (pseudofactual) was in fact the outcome of previous evolutions, rather than simply a traditional practice or a reaction against an earlier fanciful novel (often called romance). Specifically, during the seventeenth century the novel mimed epic and tragedy in borrowing its protagonists from history, becoming measurably more “Aristotelian” starting around the 1630s. It was this Aristotelian novel that subsequently declined in the face of the pseudofactual novel described in Chapter 1. Taken together, these two chapters demonstrate that modern critical investment in a “single birth” narrative — i.e., that the novel rose where once there was nothing like it — is untenable.

This chapter approaches the roman-nouvelle distinction by treating these artifacts as Wittgensteinian “families”: what makes a roman a roman (or a nouvelle a nouvelle) is not one particular shared feature but a pattern of overlapping similarities. Using the criteria of length, linearity, and truth posture to establish a series of different scenarios for determining what might be considered a roman (or a nouvelle), the transition between the two forms can be clearly mapped. Against the commonplaces of traditional French literary history, it reveals that the roman was in decline before the arrival of the nouvelle. It also shows that the roman was in no way a traditional or archaic form, but one with its own relatively short history.

This chapter examines the spread of the generic term nouvelle (and the related histoire) in subtitles between 1601 and 1750 as a second way of empirically describing the 1660 rupture. It follows correlations between the use of the subtitle and other characteristics such as length, truth posture, and historical setting. Nonetheless, most correlations are weak or temporary, resulting in the conclusion that novels with the nouvelle subtitle are probably not substantially different from those without it.

Quantitative data do not support previous accounts of the novel's rise. The record shows no moments of rupture, but instead a constant formal churning. Because that churning is pattered, we may speak of the novel as in fact a system of artifacts. Appropriating the insights of Science and Technology Studies and especially the theory of technological evolution developed by W. Brian Arthur (The Nature of Technology, ), this chapter elaborates a technological model for understanding the evolution of the system, which takes place both on the level of the system as a whole and on that of the artifacts that compose it. Arthur's concept of “redomaining” — the achievement of a given purpose with a different technology — is particularly important for understanding the long delay needed for the spread of document novels, whose technology was discontinuous with respect to that of previous novels composing the system. Finally, the chapter suggests that fictionalization was part of a longue durée development of narrative postures less and less skeuomorphic with respect to oral narrative models, and more aligned with print transmission.

This chapter is the first of three that attempt to empirically measure the commonly attested rupture between the roman and the nouvelle around the year 1660. (This rupture is a version of the frequent opposition in English literary history between romance and novel.) According to Du Plaisir’s 1683 Sentiments sur les lettres, the use of inset narratives would appear to be a defining formal characteristic of the roman. After exploring the haphazard spread of this device from the French translation of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica in the 1540s to the opening of the seventeenth century, the chapter details the rise and fall of various sorts of insetting up to 1750.