Introduction: The drift of fiction

Drawing the trajectory from Ian Watt to critics like Michael McKeon, Nancy Armstrong, Catherine Gallagher, Deidre Lynch, and Franco Moretti, the Introduction to this special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation engages the ongoing conversation about the novel-an entity that remains provisional, openended, and far from monolithic. This special issue gives us a new picture of the eighteenth-century novel not so much as a unified body, but as self-conscious permutations of fiction that drift rather than march into mixed forms of realism. For this reason, fiction-with its meaning rooted in fashioning, framing, and inventing-is a more apt term for the elastic imaginative prose narratives of eighteenth-century England than novel.