The eighteenth century: narrative forms, scholarship, and learning

1996 ◽  
pp. 336-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Stolley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Forms

The Epic as Nation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip V. Bohlman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
El Cid ◽  
Narrative Forms ◽  
Different Sources

A full translation of the Iberian epic, El Cid, remained one of Herder’s most ambitious project throughout his life. Herder drew from several different sources, both Spanish and French, to create an expansive work of 70 cantos, which reflect the transmission in the smaller narrative forms of the Spanish romance and their realization in German through the line-by-line decasyllabic forms of epic, thereby representing its singability in oral tradition. The Cid’s story of encounter between religions in medieval Al-Andalus was widely known already in eighteenth-century Europe, but Herder’s translation, which would appear in hundreds of versions into the twentieth century, became one of the most sweepingly influential texts of epic nationalism.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 205-212
Author(s):  
Arne Höcker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Rational Discourse ◽  
Narrative Literature ◽  
Psychological Truth ◽  
Style Of Writing ◽  
Narrative Forms

This chapter studies how the experience and cultivation of individual subjectivity that since the end of the eighteenth century was inextricably tied to literary discourse and narrative forms of storytelling seems to have been absorbed completely into a thinking and writing in cases. The previous chapters read Robert Musil's and Alfred Döblin's novels as poetological responses to this development. In The Man without Qualities, Musil suggests an essayistic style of writing with which the literary text distances itself from scientific and rational discourse without, however, lapsing into mere fiction. Moreover, the essay sets out to fictionalize rational discourse and pushes it to the very point where it coincides with the fiction that precedes it. Döblin, in contrast, confines his critique to that of narrative while affirming the validity of scientific methods. As a consequence, he rejects any psychological truth claim of literary discourse and attempts to turn the novel into a modern epos that approaches life in its unfiltered totality. The chapter then considers three phases of the discourse of literature, each of which reflects a transformation in the function of fiction that defines the particular historical status of narrative literature.

Conclusion: Millennial Times, Perennial Times

2018 ◽  
pp. 220-238
Author(s):  
Randall Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Thomas Pynchon ◽  
Don Delillo ◽  
Laurence Sterne ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
Narrative Forms

The millennium and fears of its ‘bug’ confirmed how far the modern world remained in thrall to exacting temporalities. Some early C21st-century novels – e.g. by W.G. Sebald– extended the resistive strategies of modernism, alongside recent ones described in Chapter Six. Others – by Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon – suggested different strategies for evading temporal constraints, and also some of the latter’s origins in the eighteenth century ‘Age of Reason’ and Industrial Revolution. Examining this age clarifies how far the rise of the novel (in its modern mode) may be attributed to newly-exacting influences of the clock on contemporary life, and how extensively these were resisted by early practitioners of the form, particularly Laurence Sterne. Resistance to the clock’s orderings can of course be further retraced, though Shakespeare’s plays – even back to Roman times – with much C20th writing suggesting it shares in wider, perennial antinomies between human reason, or agency, and nature. Though perhaps perennial, such antinomies should be seen as historically specific in scale and nature, and particularly inflected within C20th imagination. Tracing this inflection, as this study has shown, offers a powerful means of understanding the century’s history and the ways this has shaped its imagination and narrative forms.

Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Bryant Reeves
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century
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