The Rise and Decline of the Epistolary Novel, 1770–1832

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ros Ballaster
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charlotte Lennox ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Tobias Smollett ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Epistolary Novel ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
Main Protagonist ◽  
Epistolary Exchange

This essay charts the fortunes of a specific genre, the epistolary novel, which delivers plot and character exclusively through letters whether from a single correspondent, a couple, or many. In the shadow of Richardson’s dominance, there are successive attempts to innovate and experiment both of personality (presenting new kinds of voice and main protagonist) and geography (sending letter-writers to parts of the globe ‘new’ to English readers). It opens with the healthy flourishing of letter fiction from 1769 to 1780 and the twin traditions of domestic (Elizabeth Griffith, Frances Burney) and picaresque (Tobias Smollett). The epistolary mode is next experimented with in the 1790s to describe and define both revolutionary turmoil and colonial experience by authors such as Charlotte Smith, Eliza Fenwick, Phoebe Gibbes, and Charlotte Lennox. The early decades of the eighteenth century see the troubled departure from and live burial of epistolary exchange in the novels of Edgeworth, Owenson, and Scott.

The Letters in the Story

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eve Tavor Bannet
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Aphra Behn ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Charlotte Lennox ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Epistolary Novels

The long tradition of mixta-genera fiction, particularly favoured by women novelists, which combined fully-transcribed letters and third-person narrative has been largely overlooked in literary criticism. Working with recognized formal conventions and typical thematic concerns, Tavor Bannet demonstrates how narrative-epistolary novels opposed the real, situated, transactional and instrumental character of letters, with their multi-lateral relationships and temporally shifting readings, to merely documentary uses of letters in history and law. Analyzing issues of reading and misreading, knowledge and ignorance, communication and credulity, this study investigates how novelists adapted familiar romance plots centred on mysteries of identity to test the viability of empiricism's new culture of fact and challenge positivism's later all-pervading regime of truth. Close reading of narrative-epistolary novels by authors ranging from Aphra Behn and Charlotte Lennox to Frances Burney and Wilkie Collins tracks transgenerational debates, bringing to light both what Victorians took from their eighteenth-century forbears and what they changed.

‘Full of pretty stories’: Fiction in the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny DiPlacidi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Domestic Novel ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Derivative Work ◽  
Serial Fiction

Magazine fiction in eighteenth-century periodical publications such as the Lady’s Magazine has, on the whole, been disparaged as unoriginal, derivative work produced by amateurs. Jenny DiPlacidi’s essay robustly contests these claims by demonstrating how a range of sentimental, Gothic, epistolary and experimental short and serial fiction in the Magazine thematically, tonally and stylistically influenced the novels of canonical figures such as Jane Austen, Frances Burney and Charlotte Smith. Magazine fiction in periodicals such as the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828), DiPlacidi argues, was, in the main, innovative and original. Far from being ephemeral, this fiction was an enduring and significant cultural form, which stylistically and thematically helped to shape the Romantic and domestic novel.

The Female Quixote

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Lennox ◽  
Margaret Anne Doody
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women's Literature ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Charlotte Lennox

The Female Quixote (1752), a vivacious and ironical novel parodying the style of Cervantes, portrays the beautiful and aristocratic Arabella, whose passion for reading romances leads her into all manner of misunderstandings. Praised by Fielding, Richardson and Samuel Johnson, the book quickly established Charlotte Lennox as a foremost writer of the Novel of Sentiment. With an excellent introduction and full explanatory notes, this edition will be of particular interest to students of women's literature, and of the eighteenth-century novel.

scholarly journals VALENTINES AND THE VICTORIAN IMAGINATION:MARY BARTONANDFAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-412
Author(s):  
Karin Koehler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Written Communication ◽  
Valentine's Day ◽  
Epistolary Exchange ◽  
Obscure Origin ◽  
The Middle Ages

The custom of celebrating Valentine'sDay dates back to the Middle Ages. The emergence of Valentine's Day as a commercial holiday, exploited above all by the greeting card industry, is more recent. In Britain, Valentine's Day cards emerged in the eighteenth century. As David Vincent writes,The observance of 14 February underwent a metamorphosis during the eighteenth century which was later to befall many other customs. What had begun as an exchange of gifts, with many local variations of obscure origin, was gradually transformed into an exchange of tokens and letters, which in turn began to be replaced by printed messages from the end of the century. (44)Early examples of pre-printed Valentine's Day stationery and manuals for the composition of the perfect valentine reveal that existing folk customs were swiftly adapted by modern print culture and an increasingly literate population. However, it was the 1840 introduction of Rowland Hill's penny post in Britain, alongside concomitant advances in American and European postal infrastructure, which led to a veritable explosion in the exchange of valentines, moulding the practice into a shape still recognisable today (see Golden 222). Hill not only democratised access to written communication by lowering prices, he also anonymised epistolary exchange. Prepaid stamps and pillar post boxes made it possible to correspond with anyone, anywhere, without giving away one's identity. And while sending an anonymous letter would have been perceived as a violation of epistolary decorum during the remainder of the year, on Valentine's Day it was not only acceptable but, as Farmer Boldwood hints in Thomas Hardy'sFar from the Madding Crowd(1874), expected. The opportunity for anonymous correspondence generated an enthusiastic response.

scholarly journals Growing Up Burney

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorna Clark
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Original Compositions ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Family Identity ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
The Family

The pressure of family identity and politics affected more than one generation of Burneys. Beyond Frances Burney, and her intense relationship with her father Charles Burney, were other family members who also felt the pressure to “write & read & be literary.” These tendencies can be seen most clearly in the works of juvenilia preserved in the family archive. A commonplace book bound in vellum has been discovered that preserves more than one hundred poems, mostly original compositions written by family and friends. The activity of commonplacing reflects a community in which reading and writing are valued. Collected by the youngest sister of Frances Burney, they seem to have been copied after she married. The juvenile writings of her nieces and nephews preponderate, whose talents were encouraged, as they give versified expression to their deepest feelings and fears. Literary influences of the Romantic poets can be traced, as the young authors define themselves in relation to these materials. Reflecting a kind of self-fashioning, the commonplace book helps these young writers explore their sense of family identity through literary form. This compilation represents a collective expression of authorship which can inform us about reading and writing practices of women and their families in the eighteenth century.

scholarly journals Blind love, Romanticism, and Rousseauʼs novel Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 305-350
Author(s):  
Alexandra Schamel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Epistolary Novel ◽  
Threshold Phenomena ◽  
Rhetorical Dimension

The article examines to what extent Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse modifies the visual paradigm of eighteenth-century anthropology, as seen in Rousseau’s ideology of substantial nature, by introducing dynamics which produce obscurité, an unattainable dimension of inwardness. The argument leads to the proposal that the subject’s strategies of hiding, masking and transforming its epistemological darkness in the penetrating regime of virtue create central aspects of the romantic mind. The term obscurité is illustrated as a dynamic of semantic “desubstantialisation” originated from the love-wound which permanently requires the supplément (Coelen, Derrida). The need for subordination under Wolmar’s “omniscient eye” effects a process of sublimation, in which the obscure semantics of love are transferred into legitimate areas of ontological diffusion, such as dreams, memories, wistfulness and even sacrifying death, the very precursors of romanticism. Respective examples, set in the context of romantic painting, illustrate how Rousseau constructs these threshold phenomena as semantic (and specter-like) substitutes for the love affect which is also more and more transmitted into the rhetorical dimension of the letters.

scholarly journals Miguel de Cervantes en The Monthly Review y The Critical Review: la prosa (1749-1800)

Archivum ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (67) ◽  
pp. 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mónica Amenedo-Costa
Keyword(s):  
Critical Review ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Charlotte Lennox ◽  
Tobias Smollett ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Monthly Review

Cervantes goza de un enorme protagonismo en la literatura británica del siglo XVIII. Su influencia se pone de manifiesto en Joseph Andrews, que Henry Fielding subtituló “Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes”, y en producciones de autores como Tobias Smollett o Charlotte Lennox. La visión de la crítica cobra un valor significativo a mediados de siglo, con el nacimiento de The Monthly Review y The Critical Review que proporcionaban exámenes de novedades bibliográficas. En este trabajo se plantea el estudio de la huella cervantina en la novela británica a partir de las valoraciones críticas producidas por ambas publicaciones periódicas desde sus inicios hasta finales de siglo.

Archbishop Secker as a Physician

1982 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 127-135
Author(s):  
John R. Guy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Tobias Smollett ◽  
Oliver Goldsmith ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Good Deeds

Eighteenth-Century Europe is remarkable for the number of medically qualified men whose fame rests not on medicine, but on their achievements in other fields. The poets Oliver Goldsmith in England and Johann Schiller in Germany come to mind, as do the author Tobias Smollett and the French political activist Jean Marat. Another is the subject of this paper, Thomas Seeker, who in later life was successively bishop of Bristol, Oxford, and archbishop of Canterbury.Seeker’s undoubted pastoral sensitivity was reflected in his sermons and in the visitation charges which Richard Watson said deserved ‘as much attention as the best’ of those published in the eighteenth century. This, coupled with his own reticence, has tended to overshadow, if not totally eclipse, his earlier years of training as a physician, and his contribution to medicine. His biographer, Beilby Porteus, said of him ‘he chose always rather to talk of things than persons; was very sparing in giving his opinion of characters... Of his own good deeds or great attainments he never spoke, nor loved to hear others speak’.

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