The Rise of the Illustrated English Novel to 1832

Author(s):  
Robert Folkenflik

This chapter describes the rise of the illustrated English novel. Eighteenth-century novels were cheap; illustrations expensive. Illustrated novels typically were not first editions, though some of the best known (Robinson Crusoe, Sir Launcelot Greaves) anomalously were. Looking at novels from roughly twenty years apart, one can see a number of changes from the increased presence of native engravers and designers to the burgeoning of illustrated volumes with the overthrow of perpetual copyright in 1774 (making possible the novel series of James Harrison and others), as well as shifting technologies leading from copperplates to the use of steel engravings in the nineteenth century. Important illustrators of novels included Pine and Clark, Hayman and Gravelot, Hogarth, Thomas Stothard, Thomas Rowlandson, Blake, and George Cruikshank.

2021 ◽  
pp. 231-236
Author(s):  
Bill Bell

The epilogue rounds off the argument by returning to Crusoe as a paradigm of the act of reading in the British empire. In the hands of different readers not even Robinson Crusoe was as straightforward as it seemed. Despite the fact that the novel has often been read as a manual for empire, it is far more complex than some commentaries would have us believe. Similar ambivalences apply to the lives and minds of many overseas British in the long nineteenth century. While the early twentieth century is commonly thought to have embodied a decline in imperial values, the reading habits of colonial subjects throughout the period would seem to indicate that imperial assurances were less robust than official sources would seem to suggest. The five reading constituencies that are described in the foregoing chapters, all of them in different ways operating within the web of empire, were ones in which individuals often found imperial confidence in its own mission wanting, something that was time and again demonstrated through in their acts of reading.


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.


Babel ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eterio Pajares

Translation and literature walked hand in hand during the eighteenth century. The English novel became very well known throughout Europe and it was widely translated into most European languages. Richardson’s and Fielding’s novels were translated into French almost immediately and from this stepping stone were rendered into Spanish about forty years after the appearance of the source text; censorship played an important role in this delay. Once again, translation was the authentic international language that facilitated the transfer of ideas from place to place. My purpose here is to concentrate on the translation not as a process but as a result, focussing on its relationship with the literature and culture of the target language. This study is going to be based on the first Spanish translation of Tom Jones, which contains important differences from the English novel of the same title, because French and Spanish translators and writers alike shared a different concept of the novel as a genre.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Seager

Every premise of the phrase “the rise of the novel” has been assailed in recent years. “The rise” suggests a single, uniform phenomenon, which scholars contest. If that phenomenon is a “rise,” it sounds inevitable and progressive in teleological terms, which critics find problematic. “The novel” implies we are dealing with a single genre, and if that genre is called “novel” we may be ignoring things that do not fit a preconception or are using a historically problematic term. For these reasons, this bibliography addresses the rise of the novel in Britain, during the period 1660–1780, aiming for greater specificity of place and time. Notwithstanding their problematizing of “the rise of the novel,” literary historians remain interested in the fact that for Shakespeare and Spenser prose fiction was barely an option, whereas for Austen and Scott two centuries later it was an obvious one. Drama and poetry had not disappeared, so what changed? The scholarship included in this bibliography takes different approaches to the problem. Some begin from history, linking the advent of the novel to social, religious, economic, or political changes. Others focus on issues intrinsic to literature, like genre. What genres did the novel develop from or alongside: how and why? How did it develop as a form, such as in terms of narrative style or characterization techniques? Though commentators starting in the 18th century sought to explain the new species of writing, and this continued during the 19th and early 20th centuries, this bibliography focuses on work following Ian Watt’s influential The Rise of the Novel (1957). Therefore, it does not cover pre-20th-century studies. Important novels in the tradition include: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722); Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719–1720) and Betsy Thoughtless (1751); Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740–1741) and Clarissa (1747–1748); Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749); Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) and Humphry Clinker (1771); Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) and A Sentimental Journey (1768); and Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782). For the reader new to this topic, I would recommend beginning with Watt, before advancing to Brean Hammond and Shaun Regan’s Making the Novel (2006) and Patricia Meyer Spacks’s Novel Beginnings (2006). Next, J. Paul Hunter’s Before Novels (1990), Jane Spencer’s The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986), Ira Konigsberg’s Narrative Technique in the English Novel (1985), and Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (1987) will give a rigorous grounding in a range of approaches through genre, formalism, feminism, historicism, and print culture, so the reader may then pursue directions such as postcolonialism, individual genres (like romance), or particular contextual factors. Nicholas Seager’s The Rise of the Novel: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (2012), alongside this bibliography, will make for a useful companion to your reading in criticism. Keep in mind that understanding the 18th-century novel will be best achieved by reading as many 18th-century novels as possible.


Author(s):  
Brian Cowan

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.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-218
Author(s):  
Petru Golban

The rise of the novel is a major aspect of the eighteenth century British literature having a remarkable typology: picaresque, adventure, epistolary, sentimental, of manners, moral, comic, anti-novel. The comic (including satirical) attitude, social concern, moral didacticism, and other thematically textualized aspects – emerging from both picaresque tradition and neoclassical principles – and together with picaresque tradition and neoclassical principles – are responsible for the emergence of verisimilitude as the forming element responsible in turn for the rise of the literary system of the novel.


2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-206
Author(s):  
MONICA CHIU

Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe is nothing less than a nationalist narrative that extols the burgeoning capitalism of eighteenth-century England. In this moving tale, a ship-wrecked slave trader, stranded on an island for twenty-four-years, single-handedly consolidates the arduous and multi-tasked feat of making bread – from planting the wheat to producing the finished product – into a one-person job. On a smaller but no less devastating scale, he also succeeds in replicating the process of colonization through his master–slave relationship with Friday. The novel thus popularizes the notion of self-sufficiency through the mechanisms of capitalism, conquest, and the transmission of hegemony.


Navegações ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 172
Author(s):  
Moizeis Sobreira de Sousa

É muito habitual pensar o romance português, sobretudo o volume de produção do século XIX, como um fenômeno ligado à importação do modelo romancístico francoinglês. Essa abordagem ignora o impacto que a tradição romancística portuguesa setecentista, muito habitualmente considerada como inexistente, teve sobre o romance do século XIX, nomeadamente a sua contribuição como elemento formativo. Com base nisso, este artigo tem por objetivo apresentar, em linhas gerais, a presença de fontes setecentistas lusitanas no romance português oitocentista, destacando dentre essas fontes a literatura de cordel e possíveis pontos de contato estabelecidos entre ela e a obra de romancistas portugueses do século XIX como Camilo Castelo Branco e Alexandre Herculano.********************************************************************The relationship between cordel literature of eighteenth-century and the rise of the novel in Portugal in the nineteenth centuryAbstract: It is very common to think about Portuguese novel as a phenomenon connected with the English and French novel. This approach ignores that the eighteenth-century Portuguese novel tradition had an impact on the nineteenth-century novel as a formative element. Based on this finding, this article aims to discuss the presence of Lusitanian eighteenth-century sources in the Portuguese novel of the nineteenth-century, highlighting among these sources the cordel literature and possible points of contact established between her and the novels of Portuguese authors of the nineteenth century as Camilo Castelo Branco and Alexandre Herculano.Keywords: Novel; Cordel literature; Camilo Castelo Branco; Alexandre Herculano, António da Silva, o Mestre de Gramática


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