The Imaginary Encyclopedia: The Novel and the Reference Work in the Age of Reason

Abstract

The Imaginary Encyclopedia explores the relationship between aesthetics and epistemology in the eighteenth century by positing a formal analogy between the early novel and the reference work (e.g., Johnson’s Dictionary, Diderot’s Encyclopédie). The dissertation considers that analogy from two reciprocal vantages: first, by conceptualizing the early novel as a particularly elastic type of reference work and, second, by studying the reference work as a cohesive, imagined literary world. The book frames that mirror effect between two theoretical axes: on one hand, Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, which describes the rational structuration that occurs within all imaginative or creative thought and, on the other hand, Theodor W. Adorno’s work on the influence of folklore and ritual on the development of Enlightenment rationality. The project therefore uses the dynamic between the novel and the reference work as a symbolic gateway to this question: what if we took the processes of imaginative writing to be structurally similar or identical to the processes of rational or scientific inquiry? In answering that troublesome question, The Imaginary Encyclopedia surveys four eighteenth-century writers who experimented with aesthetic form for the purpose of conveying abnormally dense amounts of information. First, it looks at Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year as a narrative that embraces encyclopedism, using scientific or referential description to position itself as a contribution to the nascent social sciences. It then moves on to two novelists – Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne – who are expressly skeptical of the utility of the reference work but unable to escape its powerful allure as an organizational framework for their fiction. Finally, it concludes with a chapter on James Boswell’s journals, which give contemporary readers a vivid sense of how the interaction between literary writing and encyclopedic writing inhered in the everyday consciousness of eighteenth-century authors. These four readings suggest that the early English novel’s form revolutionized the organization of Enlightenment information, providing an aesthetic medium for syncretic compilation and the means to index subjective experience as though it were a scientific object. In other words, the novel was not merely capable of encyclopedism – as Edward Mendleson famously argued in defending various “epic novels” – but encyclopedic in its very structure.