It-Narratives and Spy Novels

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Festa
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Commercial Expansion

This chapter focuses on it-narratives and spy novels. In the 1750s and 1760s, coins, clockwork, coaches, garments, pens, pets, and pests, all assumed a speaking part in a series of immensely popular tales recounted from the point of view of inanimate things or animals. This popular appetite for the adventures and ruminations of coins and clothing was complemented by a resurgence of interest in ‘spy narratives’, which recorded the exploits of Europeans and exposed the follies of their customs and manners from the perspective of an invisible rambler or foreign observer. Although slighted in narratives of the rise of the novel that emphasize formal realism and psychological depth, such subgenres play a significant role in the mid-eighteenth-century history of prose fiction in their representation of the print market's response to the shifting relations between persons and things wrought by commercial expansion, social mobility, and the burgeoning imperial engagements of Great Britain at mid-century.

‘Damn these printers … By heaven, I'll cut Hoey's throat’: The History of Mr. Charles Fitzgerald and Miss Sarah Stapleton (1770), a Catholic Novel in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-264
Author(s):  
Ian Campbell Ross
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Species ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
English Language ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Marriage Plot ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of

The History of Mr Charles Fitzgerald and Miss Sarah Stapleton (Dublin, 1770) is a satirical marriage-plot novel, published by the Roman Catholic bookseller James Hoey Junior. The essay argues that the anonymous author was himself a Roman Catholic, whose work mischievously interrogates the place of English-language prose fiction in Ireland during the third-quarter of the eighteenth century. By so doing, the fiction illuminates the issue, so far neglected by Irish book historians, of how the growing middle-class Roman Catholic readership might have read the increasingly popular ‘new species of writing’, as produced by novelists in Great Britain and Ireland. The essay concludes by reviewing the question of the authorship of The History and offering a new attribution to the Catholic physician and poet, Dr Dominick Kelly, of Ballyglass, Co. Roscommon.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Production Distribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Fifteenth

This book is the first volume in a twelve-volume series presenting a history of English-language prose fiction. The titles in this series are concerned with novels as a whole, not just the ‘literary’ novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and tendencies. This book explores the long period between the origins of printing in late fifteenth-century England and the establishment of the novel as a recognized, reputable genre in the mid-eighteenth century. Later chapters in the volume provide original, authoritative accounts of innovations by the major canonical authors, notably Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, who have traditionally been seen as pioneering ‘the rise of the novel’, in Ian Watt's famous phrase. With its extended chronological and geographical range, however, the volume also contextualizes these eighteenth-century developments in revelatory new ways, to provide a fresh, bold, and comprehensive account of the richness and variety of fictional traditions as they developed over two and a half centuries.

Restoration Theatre and the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Transition ◽  
Strong Affinity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Restoration Theatre ◽  
Restoration Comedy ◽  
London Stage

This chapter explores the broad cultural transition from drama to novel during the Restoration period, which triggered one of the most productive periods in the history of the London stage. However, when it comes to the eighteenth century proper, the novel is more likely to be identified as the century's most significant and appealing popular genre. The chapter considers why the novel has largely superseded drama as the literary form to which ambitious and imaginative literary types without a strong affinity for verse writing would by default have turned their attention and energies by the middle of the eighteenth century. Something important may have been lost in the broad cultural transition from drama to novel. This chapter, however, contends that many things were preserved: that the novel was able to absorb many of the functions and techniques not just of Restoration comedy but of the theatre more generally.

Tom Jones

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Fielding
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fourth Edition ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
History Of

Fielding's comic masterpiece of 1749 was immediately attacked as `A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery'. Indeed, his populous novel overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes, hypocrites, scoundrels, virgins, and all too fallible humanitarians. At the centre of one of the most ingenious plots in English fiction stands a hero whose actions were, in 1749, as shocking as they are funny today. Expelled from Mr Allworthy's country estate for his wild temper and sexual conquests, the good-hearted foundling Tom Jones loses his money, joins the army, and pursues his beloved across Britain to London, where he becomes a kept lover and confronts the possibility of incest. Tom Jones is rightly regarded as Fielding's greatest work, and one of the first and most influential of English novels. This carefully modernized edition is based on Fielding's emended fourth edition text and offers the most thorough notes, maps, and bibliography. The introduction uses the latest scholarship to examine how Tom Jones exemplifies the role of the novel in the emerging eighteenth-century public sphere.

scholarly journals “In a Sea of Wonders:” Eastern Europe and Transylvania in the Irish-Language Translation of Dracula

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-83
Author(s):  
Sorcha De Brún
Keyword(s):  
Original Work ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Language Translation ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The Novel ◽  
European Language ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of

Abstract The publication of the Irish-language translation of Dracula in 1933 by Seán Ó Cuirrín was a landmark moment in the history of Irish-language letters. This article takes as its starting point the idea that language is a central theme in Dracula. However, the representation of Transylvania in the translation marked a departure from Bram Stoker’s original. A masterful translation, one of its most salient features is Ó Cuirrín’s complex use of the Irish language, particularly in relation to Eastern European language, character, and landscapes. The article examines Ó Cuirrín’s prose and will explore how his approaches to concrete and abstract elements of the novel affect plot, character, and narration. The first section explores how Dracula is treated by Ó Cuirrín in the Irish translation and how this impacts the Count’s persona and his identity as Transylvanian. Through Ó Cuirrín’s use of idiom, alliteration, and proverb, it will be shown how Dracula’s character is reimagined, creating a more nuanced narrative than the original. The second section shows how Ó Cuirrín translates Jonathan Harker’s point of view in relation to Dracula. It shows that, through the use of figurative language, Ó Cuirrín develops the gothic element to Dracula’s character. The article then examines Ó Cuirrín’s translations of Transylvanian landscapes and soundscapes. It will show how Ó Cuirrín’s translation matched Stoker’s original work to near perfection, but with additional poetic techniques, and how Ó Cuirrín created a soundscape of horror throughout the entirety of the translation.

scholarly journals Emotions vocabulary and the reconceptualisation of emotions in Ann Radcliffe’s “The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents”

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-58
Author(s):  
Elena D. Andonova-Kalapsazova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
History Of

The article undertakes the analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) from a history of literary emotions perspective which, I argue, yields insights into the attitudes towards emotions embedded in Radcliffe’s works. A reading of the novel from such a perspective also complements the critical studies of the artist’s engaging with the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. The novel is read as a text that registered but also participated in the dissemination of an epistemology of emotional experience articulated in the idiom of eighteenth-century moral philosophers – Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith - at the same time as it retained some of the older, theology-based conceptions of passions and affections. The dynamic in which the two frameworks for understanding the emotions exist in the novel is explored through a close reading of the vocabulary in which Radcliffe rendered the emotional experiences of her fictional characters. In this reading it is the passions which are found to have been invested with a variety of meanings and attributed a range of moral valences that most noticeably foreground the movement from a generally negative towards a more complex appreciation of powerful emotions.

Consumerism and the Rise of Balloons in Europe at the End of the Eighteenth Century

2008 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Lynn
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Cultural Importance ◽  
Scientific Experiment ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Machine

ArgumentThe history of ballooning has received considerable attention from historians examining the technological innovations behind it as well as from scholars interested in aeronautical anecdotes concerning launches and disasters. The cultural importance of this new machine, however, remains less fully analyzed. This essay explores one facet of that history through a discussion of the commodification of launches in France and Great Britain. These two countries, which have larger middling classes as well as a higher degree of commercialization in general, provided a fertile environment for aeronauts seeking to instruct and entertain an audience willing to fund ballooning. Balloonists had to invent ways to market this scientific discovery and determine how best to attract paying customers. The audience was entertained while simultaneously empowered to act as witnesses to what balloonists presented as a scientific experiment.

Anglo-Irish constitutional relations in the later eighteenth century

1964 ◽  
Vol 14 (53) ◽  
pp. 20-38
Author(s):  
J.C. Beckett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
British History ◽  
Irish History ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Basic Theme ◽  
History Of ◽  
George Iii

Few periods of Irish history have been more extensively written about than the later eighteenth century: a mere list of books and papers dealing with the Volunteer movement, ‘Grattan's parliament’, the insurrection of 1798 and the legislative union of 1800 would make up a moderate-sized volume. Most of these writings are concerned, directly or indirectly, with the constitutional relationship between Ireland and Great Britain. Indeed, it might be said that this relationship is the basic theme in the Irish history of the period, even for social and economic historians; and the pattern is so well-established that it may well seem rash to assume that it can be substantially modified, or even made significantly clearer, except, perhaps, by the production of new and hitherto unsuspected evidence. Yet there is something to be said for looking again at the whole subject on the basis of our existing knowledge, not simply, as Irish historians are inclined to do, from the standpoint of Ireland, nor yet as if events in Ireland were a mere appendage to British history, but rather, as Professor Butterfield has done for one brief period in his George III, Lord North and the people, to consider Anglo-Irish constitutional relations during the late eighteenth century as part of the general political history of the British Isles.

At the Gates of Realism

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-297
Author(s):  
Sunil Agnani
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
European Literature ◽  
Investigative Tool ◽  
History Of

Enlightenment Orientalism rewrites the history of the novel by restoring consideration of a range of texts (and overlooked aspects of oft-read works) systematically excluded because they failed to fit existing notions of domestic realism. Aravamudan anchors his alternative genealogy in more capacious conceptions of the novel and inverts the usual understanding of Orientalism as restrictive stereotype to instead ask why Orientalism was so productive of cultural products in European literature. The subgenre of enlightenment Orientalism evinces a heteroglossia that exceeds national realism, and recuperating this broader fictional landscape allows readers to recognize a range of texts otherwise taken to be strange because it falls between genres (transgeneric) or between national spaces (intercultural). Taking the novel to be a cultural transportation device, Aravamudan describes this broader fictional ensemble as an investigative tool that is an alternative to the nation-centered novel after the mid-eighteenth century.

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