This dissertation argues that the ways in which eighteenth-century pioneers of the English novel played with narrative form challenges the conventional privileging of causality as the organizational principle of plot by imparting value to deferral and digression. Until recently, Structuralist narratology’s faith in progression as the only viable momentum of novelistic plot has dominated scholarly treatment of digression, which has been cursory at best. My project proposes that collectively speaking, the formal idiosyncrasies so emblematic of eighteenth- century literature constituted an artistic response to a host of contemporary intellectual and technological innovations in the human ability to perceive.

The long eighteenth century saw the parallel ascendances of empiricist thought led by scholars like David Hume and John Locke, and chronometric innovations that allowed for increasingly nuanced measurements of how time passes. I show that these transformations in the theory and practice of human perception, which subverted the concept of a divinely created objective world in favor of one that could be shaped by human perception and intervention, encouraged the stylistic experimentation in literature characteristic of the era. The Oriental tales of Antoine Galland and Frances Sheridan deploy the Orient as a backdrop for attesting the power of human induction and its ability to shape the world. Henry Fielding’s fiction presents itself as an alternative to historical writing, better able to capture the universal truths of human nature because of its ability to jettison the strictures of time and space. Laurence Sterne’s body of work replaces the logic of causality with the logic of contiguity as a way of challenging rationalism and readerly expectations that equate narrative progression with logical plot progression. These examples all point to the eighteenth century’s investment in using digression and deferral to contemplate alternatives to the traditional tripartite structure of plot at a crucial juncture in the solidification of the novel genre.