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 The chapter considers why the novel has largely superseded drama as the literary form to which ambitious and imaginative literary types without a strong affinity for verse writing would by default have turned their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 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.

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.

Frances Burney and the Art of Accident

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-441
Author(s):  
Katarina O'Briain
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Unexpected Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract This article argues that Frances Burney's long, diffuse works of fiction develop an ethics of accident within the history of the novel. Whereas critics from the eighteenth century to today have privileged “art”—in the sense of careful, deliberate skill and conduct—as a crucial marker of human character, Burney insists on filling her novels with a succession of unexpected events and a multitude of characters surprised by their own actions. By refusing to treat accident as a mistake to be improved upon—in the realm of either characterological conduct or authorial craft—Burney posits an ethics of the novel that treats matters of chance and modes of depleted agency as central aspects of the human condition rather than as markers of moral or aesthetic failure. Setting Burney's texts within ascendant modes of economy and finance in the eighteenth century, the article suggests that this ethics marks a key change within the rise of the novel that continues well into late capitalism.

scholarly journals Learning finance through fiction: ‘Cecilia’ and the perils of credit

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-74
Author(s):  
Joyce Goggin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Future ◽  
As If ◽  
Affective Structure

This article discusses the rise of modern banking, the invention of credit and a related persistent orientation to the future inherent in credit-based economies, through the example of the novel which, as a literary form, came into being at roughly the same time. As a distinctly commercial genre and as a product of the financial revolution, novels ask readers to ‘credit’ the stories they tell with truthfulness, and to invest them with a particular form of credibility as significant narratives. At the same time, novels invite readers to imagine ‘as if’ scenarios and possible worlds in much the same way that borrowed capital enables people to construct life worlds based on resources not yet realised through investment in a speculative economy. Therefore, by examining how finance and gambling debts circulate in one particular text from the eighteenth century – Francis Burney’s Cecilia – as a primary example of how credit and fictionalisation grew up together, this article argues that credit and risk feed into the narrative accounting and recounting of the text and articulate the affective structure of the financialised future that we have now inherited, and which informs how we understand ourselves as subjects, as well as how we interact with finance as a form of entertainment.

Making Publics and Making Novels

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Cowan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Structural Transformation ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Public ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Political Partisanship ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere

The two most influential works for the study of eighteenth-century literary culture in the last half-century must surely be Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) and Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). This essay discusses the influence of both Watt and Habermas on studies of the novel and the public sphere, and it explores the reasons for the endurance of their arguments despite decades of substantial criticism devoted to their interpretative shortcomings. It also explains the emergence of a post-Habermasian approach to the history of public-making in response to these criticisms. It concludes by discussing how recent post-Habermasian studies of news culture and political partisanship may illuminate the history of the origins of the English novel.

The Diaristic Form and Subjectivity under Khrushchev

Slavic Review ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 805-827 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anatoly Pinsky
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Soviet History ◽  
Soviet Literature ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Empirical Investigations

At the start of the post-Stalin period, writers and literary critics began to embrace the diaristic form as never before in Soviet history. In this article, I explore the gravitation toward this and other short and documentary genres. I foreground the subject of literary form, which has, I maintain, for too long remained in the background of scholarship on Soviet literature. The rise of a new privileged form was related dialogically to the emergence of a new normative subjectivity–one that called on citizens to engage in meticulous empirical investigations of Soviet life and to arrive at and advance their own critical conclusions about Soviet reality. In advancing these arguments, I revise the interpretations of Soviet literary history that have highlighted the significance of the novel, contributing to a growing body of scholarship on the history of Soviet subjectivity.

The Stage Career of Eliza Haywood

1964 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Elwood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Domestic Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Way

Female playwrights of varying degrees of quality were reasonably plentiful in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England; but, except for Eliza Haywood, few of these playwrights doubled as actresses, at least with sufficient success for us to be aware of their talents. Even the stage career of Mrs. Haywood, one extending at least from 1715 to 1737, has not been documented in its entirety before now. It deserves attention because it adds some details to the scanty biography of this woman who is best known as a novelist, a novelist who turned out scandal chronicles long before Richardson made the novel morally acceptable, and who in 1751 produced what may be the first domestic novel in English,The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. Along the way she had some success as a publisher, as the first woman writer of a periodical for women, as a poet, and as a playwright and actress. It was her efforts in the theater that drew the attention of such men as Jonathan Swift and Richard Savage and brought her into a rather lengthy association with Henry Fielding. And it was her theatrical experience that contributed much to her eventual skill as a novelist. She liked the stage, and much of what we like in her later work she owed to the stage.

scholarly journals SOCIAL PROTEST AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-114
Author(s):  
Dohal Gassim-H.
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
History Of

The early eighteenth century witnessed the early development of the dominant literary form of modern times, the novel. The novel emerged as a form with structure and interplay between individuals and their relationships to society. As a new form, the novel tends to make some significant, critical, and social statements about the society. Hence, the novel is used to create a new environment that is related to life and people. Indeed, this is what makes the novel appeal to readers as a new genre. Novelists either try to deal with daily social problems that happen in the lives of people or pretend that they are telling real stories. It is not surprising to find that Daniel Defoe molds his Robinson Crusoe (1719)on a real story while Samuel Richardson in Pamela (1740) turns out to be didactic to meet the needs of the growing numbers of female readers. On his part, Henry Fielding tries to expose his society to the readers in his masterpiece The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749); from now on Tom Jones. Accordingly, the novel becomes popular at this time because it has something relevant to the mob; it deals with their social life, and they can identify themselves with its characters in the actual daily life. Through Tom Jones, Fielding presented “a true and realistic picture of human nature” (Kettle, 71). As long as its main concern is the existing society, novelists feel so involved that their criticism becomes direct, frank, and effective. My paper deals with these concerns as depicted in the novels mentioned above.

The Quiet Contemporary American Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Sykes
Keyword(s):  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Marilynne Robinson ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Reduced Volume ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hester Prynne ◽  
Selection Of

What does it mean to describe a novel as ‘quiet’? The quiet contemporary American novel defines the term as an aesthetic of narrative that is driven by reflective principles. While, at first appearance, ‘quiet’ seems a contradictory description of any literary form, because it risks suggesting that the novelist has nothing to say, this book argues that the quiet of the novel is better conceived as a mode of conversation that occurs at a reduced volume than as the failure to speak. The quiet contemporary American novel then makes two critical interventions. First, it maps the neglected history of quiet fictions and argues that from Hester Prynne to Clarissa Dalloway, from Bartleby to William Stoner, quiet characters fill the novel in the Western tradition. As a phrase, ‘the quiet novel’ also has a long and untraced history, dating back 150 years. Throughout its long history, many critics have used ‘the quiet novel’ as a phrase that dismisses and derides the work of writers whose novels seem disengaged from the ‘noise’ of their wider society. The quiet contemporary American novel finally takes up the long referred to idea of quiet fiction to ask what it means for a novel to be quiet and, through discussion of a diverse selection of contemporary writers including Marilynne Robinson, Teju Cole, and Lynne Tillman, asks how we might read for quiet in an American literary tradition that critics so often describe as noisy.

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