Story and history

In Story and History, William Ray describes the progress of the novel as the fashioning of private desires and "natural sentiments into an exemplary collectivity. Novels are modern not only in their fidelity to sense perception and the particulars of human experience, as Watt's Rise of the Novel has shown, but also in the capacity they have to shape that reality by their regulation of affect. Ray shows how in eighteenth-century critical commentary it is the moral consequences of history that are given the most emphasis-the way in which historical and fictional discourses operate upon the world so as in part to produce the very social practices of which they are an expression. In the case of the novel this involves the transformation of private histories into exemplary narratives in such a way that private accounts of the self and the particular affective relations they produce c an participate in a sense of shared cultural history. -- from http://www.jstor.org (Dec. 6, 2013).