This book aims to be a comprehensive and demanding critique of 18th-century English and French fiction. Rereading works from this period, William Ray offers a systematic exploration of how individual instances of the literary ordering of experience relate to larger public and political orders of authority. He argues that the novel's rise coincided with a growing conviction, both reflected and fostered in the period, that selfhood, social identity, public authority and even historical truth all hinge on narrative representation.

This book proposes an analysis of the underlying 'logic' of culture, drawing on a wide range of material not previously examined in works of this kind.