“Something Aristotle never thought of”: paradoxical reflections on the Poetics and the novel

Mikhail Bakhtin claimed that the novel was the only literary genre which could not be accommodated within an Aristotelian system of poetics. Much earlier, Cervantes’ Don Quixote had described the prose romance as “something Aristotle never thought of”. Cervantes’ phrase reflects sixteenth-century Italian debates about the relationship between verse romances and canonical classical epic. Taking its bearings from this aspect of the early-modern reception of the Poetics, the present chapter closely examines the critical essays incorporated paratextually in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749), treating them as a case study in the paradoxes that arose from the idea of reconfiguring Aristotelian poetic principles to fit a modern genre of prose writing. Fielding’s essays, which belong to a pivotal period when the authority of the Poetics was coming under increasing pressure from new literary trends, are interpreted as an exercise in testing, not without irony, how far the tenets of (neo-)Aristotelian poetics can legitimately be stretched. Despite Fielding’s assertion of his own creative autonomy in preference to neoclassical ‘rules’, the Poetics has in fact persisted in holding value for several modern theorists of the novel. There is, then, a more complicated story to be told than Bakhtin’s claim would lead one to suppose.