SOURCE: Showalter, English, Jr. “Techniques of Realism in Early Fiction: Serious Fiction.” In The Evolution of the French Novel, 1641-1782, pp. 124-93. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972.

In following excerpt, Showalter examines Scudéry's theories of the novel, as delineated in his preface to Ibrahim.

Serious fiction is a great deal more nebulous a concept than the comic novel, which can be limited to a dozen or so major works. A serious novel is one in which an effort is made to reproduce reality, however it be defined. As I have pointed out, most comic novels contain examples of serious novels; furthermore, the comic novelist almost unwittingly has to reproduce reality as part of his burlesque of some serious form. I will omit these serious elements of comic fiction from the rest of the discussion, however, so as to avoid ambiguous cases, even though a mistake would...