Celebrity and Scandalous Fiction

This chapter studies scandalous fiction. One way of registering how scandal fiction might figure in a revised history of the novel is to consider scandal fiction as embodying everything that the polite novel sought to repudiate or disavow: criminality, sexuality, sensation, vulgarity, voyeurism, and reflexivity. For just as the novel genre itself is a scandal for much of the eighteenth century, the increasing respectability of the novel genre from the 1750s is predicated upon the move away from forms such as romans á clef and chroniques scandaleuses. Indeed, the English novel starts to define itself as a national genre against the scandalous excesses of the French or Italian novel—which it often does while exploiting and purveying these foreign excesses. This is particularly the case with the most scandalous forms of fiction: pornography and erotic fiction.