The Continental Influence on the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Author(s):  
Walter L. Reed

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.

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.


PMLA ◽  
1903 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 412-423
Author(s):  
Edward Chauncey Baldwin

The writing of “Characters” was at the same time one of the most prolific and the most significant phases of literary activity in the seventeenth century. Though many of these books of “Characters” have been forgotten, the titles of over one hundred and fifty are still remembered—enough certainly to show how popular the fashion of such writing was. Furthermore, its significance becomes apparent when we consider what prose fiction owes to it; for, through the periodical essay of the eighteenth century, the old formal “Character” passed into the novel and become a part of it.


Author(s):  
Jenny Mander

This chapter examines foreign novels, which greatly overshadowed the English novel. The prevalence of imitations and translations of foreign novels had been a matter of significant critical concern throughout the first half of the eighteenth century and contemptuously identified by many a censorious reviewer as a corrupting influence on both the morals and letters of the nation. By the middle of the century, however, there was a strong sense that the English novel had come of age; and as British novelists progressively consolidated their position both at home and abroad, readers became decreasingly dependent on foreign fiction. Nonetheless, non-native fiction remained a convenient focus for multiple anxieties relating to the genre of the novel and its commercialization. For while the overall picture for 1750–1820 as regards imported imaginative literature was one of general decline, many foreign novelists continued to compete successfully for the attention of the British public.


Author(s):  
Juan Antonio Garrido Ardila

RESUMENEste artículo sopesa las principales derrotas en las investigaciones en torno a la presencia, recepción e influjo del Quijote en la novela inglesa del siglo XVIII. Se parte aquí de la distinción establecida entre novelas inglesas dieciochescas de temática quijotesca (las denominadas Quixotic fictions) y aquellas cuyas características formales se inspiran en el Quijote (las Cervantean novels). Respecto de las primeras se subraya la escasez deestudios y las muchas posibilidades que estas brindan al estudioso que quiera indagar en el tratamiento satírico de la compleja sociedad que las inspiró. De las Cervantean novels se destaca su engarce con la literatura de los dos siglos precedentes. La influencia cervantina en autores del Dieciocho como Fielding, Smollett y Sterne, en contraposición a la influencia picaresca en el Diecisiete, se explica aquí por razón de la necesidad, enla primera mitad del XVIII, de dotar la narrativa inglesa de las características formales de la novela moderna, lo cual hallaron en el Quijote.PALABRAS CLAVECervantes en Inglaterra, Quijote, novela inglesa del siglo XVIII, ficción cervantina, ficción quijotesca. TITLE«Don Quixote’s» sallies in eighteenth-century english fictionABSTRACTThis article is a critique of the mainstream strands in the research into Don Quixote’s reception in England and its influence on eighteenth-century English fiction. It offers a survey of the fictional narratives with a quixotic theme (the so-called Quixotic fictions) and those which deploy formal features taken from Don Quixote(known as Cervantean novels). The discussion of Quixotic fictions notes they have attracted little critical attention, and suggests the need for future studies of their intriguing satirical scope. This article also pinpoints the need to study Cervantean fictions of the eighteenth century in relation to seventeenth-century English fiction. This article notes that whilst Spanish picaresque novels were the main foreign influence on English fiction of the seventeenth century, the great writers of the eighteenth century, namely Fielding, Smollett and  Sterne, preferred Don Quixote since Cervantes’ novel provided them with the formal features of the modern novel, at a time when these authors sought to establish canon of modern fiction in the English language.KEY WORDSCervantes in England, Don Quixote, eighteenth-century English novel, Cervantean fiction, Quixotic fiction.


Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.


PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. 381-388
Author(s):  
William Park

But the Discovery [of when to laugh and when to cry] was reserved for this Age, and there are two Authors now living in this Metropolis, who have found out the Art, and both brother Biographers, the one of Tom Jones, and the other of Clarissa.author of Charlotte SummersRather than discuss the differences which separate Fielding and Richardson, I propose to survey the common ground which they share with each other and with other novelists of the 1740's and 50's. In other words I am suggesting that these two masters, their contemporaries, and followers have made use of the same materials and that as a result the English novels of the mid-eighteenth century may be regarded as a distinct historic version of a general type of literature. Most readers, it seems to me, do not make this distinction. They either think that the novel is always the same, or they believe that one particular group of novels, such as those written in the early twentieth century, is the form itself. In my opinion, however, we should think of the novel as we do of the drama. No one kind of drama, such as Elizabethan comedy or Restoration comedy, is the drama itself; instead, each is a particular manifestation of the general type. Each kind bears some relationship to the others, but at the same time each has its own identity, which we usually call its conventions. By conventions I mean not only stock characters, situations, and themes, but also notions and assumptions about the novel, human nature, society, and the cosmos itself. If we compare one kind of novel to another without first considering the conventions of each, we are likely to make the same mistake that Thomas Rymer did when he blamed Shakespeare for not conforming to the canons of classical French drama.


2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 108-137
Author(s):  
Carsten Sestoft

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.


2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossana Barragán Romano

AbstractLabour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.


1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Hellyer

AbstractThe Society of Jesus established an extensive range of measures designed to ensure uniformity in natural philosophical questions. These culminated in the Ordinatio pro Studiis Superioribus of 1651. Such measures did have significant effects on the teaching and publishing of physics among the Jesuits in Germany; it was impossible for Jesuits to openly adhere to atomism, the Cartesian view of body or heliocentrism, for example. But many Jesuits did not agree with all the provisions governing censorship and attempted to mediate their implementation in several ways which this study identifies. The most important of these was the use of terms such as true, probable or false. Provided that Jesuit authors identified the orthodox opinions as true or most probable, they could discuss alternative views in great depth. The essay culminates in two case studies from Germany, one from the mid-seventeenth century, the other from the first half of the eighteenth century, which illustrate the interaction of censorship and physics in actual practice.


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