Abstract
In literature, scenes orient readers, structuring their experience of the fiction, focusing their desires and providing an identifiable location for specific events and exchanges (‘that scene where…’). They play an equally important structuring role for the writer, too. As Leigh Michaels explains in On Writing Romance: How to Craft a Novel That Sells (2007), ‘writing a book doesn’t look like such an overwhelming project if you think of the task in terms of constructing the individual scenes that make up the story—each one just a few pages in length’ (p. 108). But when did scenes become a fundamental structuring principle for the novel? The genre of popular romance is in fact important here: when contemporary writers emphasise the practical and theoretical centrality of scene, they repeat what could be taken as the originary scene of the romance novel itself: that moment in which Eliza Haywood transformed older forms of prose narrative by introducing the scenic form into the literary marketplace of the early eighteenth century.
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Hughes, J. (2016). Love in the Time of Finance: Eliza Haywood and the Rise of the Scenic Novel. In: Gelder, K. (eds) New Directions in Popular Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52346-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52346-4_2
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