Orlando’s Celebration of “prose not verse”

2021 ◽  
pp. 136-163
Author(s):  
Emily Kopley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Title Character

In Woolf’s literary history, the eighteenth century saw the male writer and poetry begin to cede power and popularity to the female writer and the novel. Orlando (1928) personifies this literary history with the title character, a nobleman-poet who turns from man to woman in the eighteenth century, while his/her poetry turns from tolerable to bathetic. Some of the adventures of the newly female Orlando take their inspiration from the novels of Daniel Defoe and the life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Woolf draws on Defoe and Lady Montagu to underscore the mutual ascent of women and prose. Orlando is based primarily, of course, on Vita Sackville-West. Allusions in the novel to Sackville-West’s long poem The Land (1926) betray Woolf’s dim view of her lover’s poetry and the conventional, sentimental poet figure more generally, and argue that a woman poet after the eighteenth century writes in a form poorly suited to her era and her sex.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-222
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
The Media

The conclusion shows that several of the embodied aspects of writing fiction discussed for the eighteenth-century novel can be traced into the nineteenth century through an example from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. It is shown that, like the earlier authors in the case studies in this book, Dickens features shifting embodied stances and involves elements of the media ecology of his day rather than deploying the concrete particulars that “formal realism” considers central to the novel. Links to larger arguments about the role of the novel in literary history are then drawn in contrast with accounts, based on Adorno/Habermas and Benjamin, that argue that eighteenth-century fiction becomes rationalised and disembodied with the novel and its culture industry. Rather than impoverishing experience, it is argued that the novel as a lifeworld technology depends profoundly on readers’ embodied engagements and that 4E cognition is a critical perspective that affords such an alternative take.

scholarly journals Refocusing the Gendered Gaze

2010 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Object Relation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Economic Individualism ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Moll Flanders ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Gendered Gaze

Daniel Defoe makes use of subject-object patterns within his novel Moll Flanders in order to produce ruptures within eighteenth-century gender ideology and to reconstitute the subject-object relation between masculine and feminine within the novel. Even as Defoe affirms the dominance of gender ideology by positioning his readers as objects of the novel, Defoe uses his character of Moll Flanders to suggest the potential for transforming ideology through the performative act of gender. As Moll struggles to link fragments of her past, she explores the boundaries of gender identity and transgresses their limits in order to achieve movement within eighteenth century society. How Moll negotiates her conceptions and interpretations of her relation to her natural, cultural, and psychological landscapes suggests her success in tracing the presence of an identity that would inform and sustain the self by allowing her to assert a sense of economic individualism, which might release her from any moral obligation to the pervasive and dominant ideologies affecting gender in the eighteenth century.

scholarly journals The Inner Quandary of Woman in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 46-49
Author(s):  
T R Deepak
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Female Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Moll Flanders ◽  
Feminist Movements ◽  
Shed Light

Daniel Defoe is an enchanted incinerator of English literature sprung during the initial years of eighteenth century. His applauded Moll Flanders (1722) is professed as picaresque in literary vegetation. He has emotionally painted the commotion of a solitary, imprudent and prevalent female distinct against an inimical and droopy humanity. As a matter of datum, the female chief strolls into the alleyway of assorted catastrophes. She has borne the humanity either in an orthodox or warped mundane. All these archetypes of women have shed light in the fiction even before the initiation of feminist movements athwart the realm. These movements have engrossed the intellect of community and sedated as operational. At regular intervals, these have performed more elegant and redundant than being operative.Moll Flanders is not a typical incarnation of feminist thoughts. It has never strained to sketch an itinerary for the relegated female personality to outshine her eccentricity. Yet, it is indubitably pro-woman and reconnoiters a female character with the reputation of protagonist. The farsighted image of woman with grander tenets of empathy and sympathy is blossomed. In the contemporary habitat, the novel may not seem like far-reaching as it pushes the female lead to imitate and regret with ceaseless kinks and contraventions. But the novelist is ahead of his epoch in aiding his female protagonist to gallop and endure the probabilities amidst dejection and misfortunes. Hence, the research ornate has through an endeavour to enchant the inner quandary of woman in a masculine captivated sophistication with reference to Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders.

Histories for Systems

System ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford Siskin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Computational Resource ◽  
Niklas Luhmann ◽  
Modern Subject ◽  
History Of ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
Title Pages ◽  
Over Time

History is a genre consisting historically of different kinds with different functions. Instead of just writing “a history” of system, we need to recover the changing relationship between these two genres—starting with Bacon’s emphasis on the need for new histories and Galileo’s focus on system. This chapter follows their interrelations into the eighteenth century using a new computational resource I call Tectonics. It maps spatially over time the coming together of system and history at the century’s end as they share more and more title pages, modifying each other and forming a new platform for knowledge: the narrow-but-deep disciplines of modernity. The chapter confirms this finding using Encyclopedia Britannica and then—with turns to William Jones and the novel--shows how history itself became one of those narrowed disciplines by foregrounding “ideas” and the modern subject that embodies them. The chapter shows how these interrelations of system and history shaped the efforts of system theory, including Immanuel Wallerstein and Niklas Luhmann, and recovers for this book a different kind of history: Bacon’s notion of a capacious literary history that would tell the “story of learning” from age to age. The chapter concludes with Carl Woese’s efforts to transform biology through a newly capacious history, and with explanations of the scope and kinds of history featured in this book: the histories of “mediation,” “blame,” and the “real.”.

Minorities in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Youssef
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robust Analysis ◽  
Specific Approach ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Historical Moment

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.

Crumbling into Dust

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Levi Barnard
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Unfinished Business ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
David Walker ◽  
Historical Times

This chapter situates Chesnutt’s writing within a tradition of black classicism as political engagement and historical critique extending from the antebellum period to the twentieth century and beyond. Reading Chesnutt as a figure at the crossroads of multiple historical times and cultural forms, the chapter examines his manipulation of multiple mythic traditions into a cohesive and unsettling vision of history as unfinished business. In the novel The Marrow of Tradition and the late short story “The Marked Tree,” Chesnutt echoes a nineteenth-century tradition that included David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and writers and editors for antebellum black newspapers, while at the same time anticipating a later anti-imperial discourse generated by writers such as Richard Wright and Toni Morrison. Chesnutt provides a fulcrum for a collective African American literary history that has emerged as a prophetic counterpoint to the prevailing historical consciousness in America.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John West
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Third ◽  
Religious Differences

Literary history often positions Dryden as the precursor to the great Tory satirists of the eighteenth century, like Pope and Swift. Yet a surprising number of Whig writers expressed deep admiration for Dryden, despite their political and religious differences. They were particularly drawn to the enthusiastic dimensions of his writing. After a short reading of Dryden’s poem to his younger Whig contemporary William Congreve, this concluding chapter presents three case studies of Whig writers who used Dryden to develop their own ideas of enthusiastic literature. These three writers are Elizabeth Singer Rowe, John Dennis, and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. These case studies are used to critique the political polarizations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary history and to stress instead how literary friendship crossed political allegiances, and how writers of differing ideological positions competed to control mutually appealing ideas and vocabularies.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Brazil
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Zadie Smith

In conclusion, this short chapter surveys the ways in which the novelists discussed in this book have become reference points for contemporary debates about the legacy of modernism and experimentation among novelists such as Teju Cole, Zadie Smith, and Ben Lerner. It also surveys how contemporary novelists’ engagements with art are being driven by different concerns than those of earlier writers—attempts to blur the lines between autobiography and fiction, or to recover the political and aesthetic potential of wonder and enchantment. In doing so, it shows how the interactions between art and the novel traced in this book have become part of literary history.

Historical Romance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter looks at historical romance. Late eighteenth-century historiography began to expand its purview to unofficial spheres of social, cultural, and private life typically cultivated by informal genres such as memoirs, biographies, and novels. The ‘matter’ of history was being increasingly redefined, and this had two key effects that bear on the question of historical romance. First, the ‘reframing’ of the historical field generated a marked reciprocity among the different historical genres in the literary field, as they borrowed material and tactics from one another; second, it led to a splintering albeit not displacement of ‘general’ history, as new branches of history writing took shape, notably that of literary history as a distinct form of history. Hence romance now denoted not only the realm of ‘fancy’ but a superseded literary form of renewed interest in the rethinking of the national past.

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