The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Book Production ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Insight Into

Although the emergence of the English novel is generally regarded as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, this is the first book to be published professing to cover the ‘eighteenth-century English novel’ in its entirety. This Handbook surveys the development of the English novel during the ‘long’ eighteenth century—in other words, from the later seventeenth century right through to the first three decades of the nineteenth century when, with the publication of the novels of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, ‘the novel’ finally gained critical acceptance and assumed the position of cultural hegemony it enjoyed for over a century. By situating the novels of the period which are still read today against the background of the hundreds published between 1660 and 1830, this Handbook covers not only those ‘masters and mistresses’ of early prose fiction—such as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney, Scott, and Austen—who are still acknowledged to be seminal figures in the emergence and development of the English novel, but also the significant number of recently rediscovered novelists who were popular in their own day. At the same time, its comprehensive coverage of cultural contexts not considered by any existing study, but which are central to the emergence of the novel—such as the book trade and the mechanics of book production, copyright and censorship, the growth of the reading public, the economics of culture both in London and in the provinces, and the reprinting of popular fiction after 1774—offers unique insight into the making of the English novel.

The Continental Influence on the Eighteenth-Century Novel

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter L. Reed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
English Novel ◽  
British Novelists

The eighteenth-century English novel was influenced by earlier prose fiction from the Continent; the English improved what others had invented. Individual novels from the Continent were imitated by British novelists; particular genres first developed abroad were adapted by them as well. Spanish novels like Don Quixote and the picaresque preceded and influenced novels of Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. Seventeenth-century French romances influenced novels of amorous intrigue by Behn, Manley, and Haywood. These in turn provoked the novel of women’s virtuous resistance created by Richardson. Earlier prose fiction from the Continent was translated into English and widely read throughout the eighteenth century. The transnational traffic in fiction flowed in the other direction as well. Rousseau’s enthusiastic embrace of Richardson popularized the transnational genre of the sentimental novel. From the 1770s onwards German fiction became influential in England, and German-derived tales of terror came to dominate the popular British market.

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.

The Reconstrual of Imagination and Romance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Knox-Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Real World ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Real ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

Emma has often convincingly been assigned to the “quixotic” novel, a genre much favored by the long eighteenth century and admired on occasion by Jane Austen herself. But whereas novels of this type invariably end with a joint renunciation of imagination and romance in deference to a greater realism, Emma shows imagination to be integral to an apprehension of the real world, and to require, for its fidelity, a principle long enshrined by romance. Austen’s understanding of imagination as both necessary and all-pervasive—held in common with a number of contemporary philosophers who built on David Hume’s analysis of the “productive” and “magical” faculty that underlay all perception—in no way lessened her sense of its ambivalence, and Emma shows how its work of construction is constantly undermined by received stereotypes as well as by insidious subterfuges of the self. The novel celebrates an empirical habit of mind, fortified by the virtue of benevolence.

scholarly journals Genrens tøven

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 108-137
Author(s):  
Carsten Sestoft
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Book Market ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Historical Semantics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Or History

Romanens status i det 17. århundredes Frankrig The hesitations of a genre: The status of the novel in seventeenth-century FranceIn answering the question: What was the novel in seventeenth-century France? – this article provides insight into some important points of the early history of the genre. The contradiction between its non-existence in official (Aristotelian) poetics and its existence as a popular commodity on the book market was, in the course of the seventeenth century, reconciled in the emergent category of belles lettres as a plurality of genres mainly defined by their public of honnêtes gens, while attempts at legitimizing the novel as belonging to such Aristotelian genres as epic or history generally failed; and at the end of the century a number of convergences – between epic and novel, between the designations roman and nouvelle, and between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of the novel – seem to point to the fact that the social existence of the genre had been strengthened, even if it was the English novel of the eighteenth century that could be said to reap the profits of this stronger position. Using historical semantics and cultural sociology to study the status of the novel in seventeenth-century France thus leads to a clearer understanding of the specificity of the novel as a literary and cultural genre.

Jane Austen’s Questioning of Gender and Genres

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Laure MASSEI-CHAMAYOU
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Conduct Books ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
Opposite View

If Jane Austen admits in her correspondence that she was eventually pleased with Thomas Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), the Anglican theologian nonetheless endorsed the prejudices shared by most eighteenth-century moralists towards novels. Now, in Northanger Abbey, a novel filled with literary allusions, Jane Austen’s narrator bravely takes the opposite view by launching into a bold defence of the genre. Besides resorting to a biting irony to scrutinize her society’s axioms, rules and power relations, her novels notably question Manichean representations of masculine and feminine roles. Jane Austen’s choice to distance herself from the strictly gendered models inherited from conduct books, sentimental, or gothic novels, further combines with her questioning of generic conventions. This article thus aims at exploring how Jane Austen engaged with these representations while articulating her subtle didacticism. Her aim was not merely to raise the respectability of the novel genre, but also to provide a possible answer to the crisis of values that was threatening the very foundations of the political and social order.

Charles Lamb's Insight Into the Nature of the Novel

PMLA ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-382
Author(s):  
Charles I. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Critical Essay ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Henry Mackenzie ◽  
External Events ◽  
Insight Into

Charles Lamb exhibited the same genial attitude toward books as toward people; he never expected too much of either, and was therefore seldom disappointed. This whimsical tolerance was especially evident in his reactions to prose fiction. He never went at a novel too seriously—with hammer and tongs, as we say; yet he could distinguish between the enduring works and the pulp. Moreover, he professed to like the same qualities in books as in people: individuality, personality, and even eccentricity. In 1821 he disclaimed a taste for the external events in narrative fiction, contrasting his attitude with that of his sister: “Narrative teases me. I have little concern with the progress of events. She must have a story.... The fluctuations of fortune in fiction ... and almost in real life ... have ceased to interest, or to operate but dully upon me. Out of the way humours and opinions—heads with some diverting twist in them—the oddities of authorship please me most” (ii, 75). There is, however, ample evidence that Lamb read widely in prose fiction and enjoyed the works of the great eighteenth-century masters—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. He also was acquainted with the writings of Sterne, Goldsmith, Henry Mackenzie, Robert Paltock, Aleman, Cervantes, Jane and Maria Porter, Godwin, Scott, and many figures of less note, including the Minerva Press offerings. As Lamb himself put it, “Defoe was always my darling” (i, 524). In 1829, at the request of his friend Walter Wilson, Lamb wrote a critical essay on Defoe's secondary novels for Wilson's book Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe.4

Radical Botany

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natania Meeker ◽  
Antónia Szabari
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Life Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Alternative Set

Radical Botany uncovers a long speculative tradition of plant fiction that conjures up new languages to grasp the life of plants—their vegetality—in all its specificity and vigor. The first part of the book reaches back to seventeenth-century materialisms to show how plants, rather than being systematically excluded from human deliberation, have in fact participated in modernity. The French authors with whom the work begins turn to plants to think through the problems and paradoxes that face all forms of life considered first as matter. Within this framework, plants are ascribed an agency and vitality that might otherwise seem foreign to them, but they are also envisioned as beings that resist incorporation into human contexts and thus have something to teach humans about their limitations and vulnerabilities. Classically, the botanical sciences that develop over the course of the long eighteenth century function as a project for ordering, visualizing, labeling, and classifying life. In Radical Botany, the authors unearth an alternative set of engagements with the plant as a life form—a tradition that conceives of vegetal life as resisting representability even as it participates in the production of new representational modes—including the novel, early cinema, and contemporary virtual reality—and new affects—including queer desires, feminist affinities, and ecological solidarities. The radical botanical works this book explores not only prioritize plants as active participants in “their” world but suggest that the apparent passivity of plants can function as a powerful destabilizing force in its own right.

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