Abstract
Since Ian Watt's seminal Rise of the Novel it has been a truth universally acknowledged that eighteenth-century fiction presents a very realistic worldview and that, for instance in Moll Flanders, Defoe gives a very convincing representation of London and life in London that offers many close observations on early eighteenth-century experience. When starting to do research on eighteenth-century description I therefore expected to find excellent examples in Moll Flanders and other key eighteenth-century novels. As it turned out, and as Cynthia Wall has recently shown, there is only little delineation of interiors in most fiction of the era and often the depictions of rooms are fairly superficial and unspecific.
The paper discusses this evidence from a historical perspective (looking back at descriptive passages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as looking ahead to the nineteenth century). It confronts the status of description in narratology and show how descriptive passages serve entirely different cognitive purposes in the texts discussed from the functions they perform in, say, nineteenth-century novels. I end with the recognition that narratological work on description has been overly determined by the novelistic literature between 1850 and 1980 and that in order to take adequate account of the type of passages one encounters in Defoe, Fielding, Smollett or Burney, one will have to revise the narratological account of description that is current. The essay has recourse to recent theoretical approaches to space (spatial turn, narratology of space) as well as linguistic and narratological work on description (Taylor & Tversky, Wolf).
