Contingency, Codex, the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Abstract

This article connects the physical form of the codex book, as one that both impedes and enables chance, to the narrative form of the novel, as one that can make closure into a condition of openness. It describes novels by Jane Austen, Laurence Sterne, Friedrich Nicolai, and Henry Fielding as exploring through this juncture the logic of contingency, by which given events or facts become points of contact with the patternlessness of the world. In particular, it offers a reading of Fielding’s Amelia as a novel that performs this investment in contingency through its own treatment of marriage.