In and After the Beginning : Inaugural Moments and Literary Institutions in the Long Eighteenth Century

Much literature of the long eighteenth century does not neatly enter into a plot at page one and proceed chronologically and causally toward a conclusion, with the linearity of a Victorian novel.

Eighteenth-century fictions can begin almost anywhere, with characters who come and go mid-tale and interpolated plots that start amid other events.

This is as true of the ephemera of the period, the under-appreciated genre such as heroic drama, prose rhapsody, digest, ballad, joke anthology, and spiritual exegesis, as it is of the major works.

Digression and miscellaneousness also characterize Cowper's ""The Task"", Swift's ""Tale of a Tub"", and Fielding's ""Tom Jones"".

Such dispersiveness is also symptomatic of an Augustan world view in which anything and everything can be a beginning.