scholarly journals A Bakhtinian Approach to the Study of Eighteenth-Century English Gothic Novels

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. p42
Author(s):  
Shuping Chen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Space Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
Space Coordinate ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Mysteries Of Udolpho ◽  
First Time

M. M. Bakhtin in the third essay of The Dialogic Imagination coined the term “chronotope” to denote the interaction and integration of time and space in novelistic narratives. Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope emphasizes that time and space coordinate with each other rather than insist on their individualities in narratives. The major chronotope of the novel usually determines its generic characteristics. The current study attempts to utilize Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope to anatomize the time-space structure of major Gothic novels in the eighteenth century, namely, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for the purpose of detecting and summarizing the common features of the Gothic genre. Manifold approaches and theories had been applied in this area, but it is the first time that Bakhtin’s chronotope was employed in the stylistic study of eighteenth-century Gothic novels written by Walpole and Radcliffe.

The Romance of the Forest

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Radcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
The Mysteries Of Udolpho

The Romance of the Forest (1791) heralded an enormous surge in the popularity of Gothic novels, in a decade that included Ann Radcliffe’s later works, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. Set in Roman Catholic Europe of violent passions and extreme oppression, the novel follows the fate of its heroine Adeline, who is mysteriously placed under the protection of a family fleeing Paris for debt. They take refuge in a ruined abbey in south-eastern France, where sinister relics of the past - a skeleton, a manuscript, and a rusty dagger - are discovered in concealed rooms. Adeline finds herself at the mercy of the abbey’s proprietor, a libidinous Marquis whose attentions finally force her to contemplate escape to distant regions. Rich in allusions to aesthetic theory and to travel literature, The Romance of the Forest is also concerned with current philosophical debate and examines systems of thought central to the intellectual life of late eighteenth-century Europe.

Fielding and Richardson

PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. 381-388
Author(s):  
William Park
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
General Type ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One

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.

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.

Emotions, Power and Popular Opinion about the Administration of Justice: The English Experience, from Coke’s ‘Artificial Reason’ to the Sensibility of ‘True Crime Stories’

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-90
Author(s):  
David Lemmings
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Emotional Engagement ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
The Common ◽  
True Crime

This article discusses emotions and power in the administration and representation of criminal justice in early modern England. In the early seventeenth century, professional lawyers insisted that only they were competent to understand the ‘artificial reason’ of the common law; and lay opinion was associated with unreliable emotional engagement with the protagonists in trials. ‘Popular jurisprudence’ received renewed impetus from the post-Reformation emphasis on conscience and divine providence, however, and this kind of common sense interpretation often featured in popular accounts of law proceedings. Moreover, the ‘low law’ administered at grass roots level by JPs was less professionalised because most magistrates were not lawyers. The development of popular and emotional jurisprudence is demonstrated in the eighteenth century by analysis of judges’ charges, popular novels, and the reportage of ‘true crime’. Ultimately, and despite further ‘lawyerisation’ of trials, this article argues that the rise of the novel and increased press reporting of criminal justice generated more vicarious engagement with the administration of justice. And this was emotional engagement: eighteenth-century popular jurisprudence represented justice as variously awesome, theatrical and unreasonably oppressive.

scholarly journals PARADIGMA ITALIJANSKOG DRUŠTVA U ROMANU "CRVENI KARANFIL" ELIJA VITTORINIJA / A PARADIGM OF THE ITALIAN SOCIETY IN "THE RED CARNATION" BY ELIO VITTORINI

2020 ◽  
pp. 288-304
Author(s):  
Mirza Mejdanija
Keyword(s):  
Adult Life ◽  
Italian Society ◽  
Original Version ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
Best Friend ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Way

Following 1925, Italy was facing a downright fascist dictatorship. The ruling politics imposed dictatorship starting with oaths of faithfulness to the regime, all the way to newspapers and school textbooks censorship. The first novel by Elio Vittorini, The Red Carnation, was confiscated by fascist censors, then revised and edited by a Florentine official. The edited and censored novel was published for the first time in 1948 by Mondadori publishing and the version published was not the original version the author himself no longer possessed. The novel tells a story of a local youth, Alessio Mainardi, and his initiation into adult life. He lives in a student dormitory together with other boys of his age.  He falls in love with a classmate, Giovanna, and even manages to kiss her on one occasion. As a token of her affection, Giovanna presents him with a red carnation that he keeps and holds dear. He is constantly holding onto this illusion of love and confides in his best friend, Tarquinio. The story in the novel takes place by the end of spring 1924, the days which are in Italy known for the Matteotti affair. Alessio and his friends consider themselves fascist. They attend protests against the Matteotti commemoration organised by antifascists. It is in this novel that Vittorini is trying to resort to a mythical transfiguration owing to which the narrative reality becomes fairytale-like, distant from time and space, without losing anything from its actual heaviness of the balance achieved between myth and reality. By means of a stylistic quest, Vittorini is trying to transfer history into a literary dimension in an allusive and symbolic way. He understands that his duty, as an author, is to transfer historical reality into symbols while the historical events depicted in the novel are the rise of fascism in Italy and Matteottiʼs murder. By means of fairytale imagery, myth and symbol, the author is trying to portray the reality in Italy at the time.

scholarly journals Rózsa Ignácz’s Torockói gyász [‘Torockó Mourning’]: Identity Beyond the Borders of Time and Space

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 28-42
Author(s):  
Zoltán Abádi-Nagy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Erving Goffman ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Narrative Techniques

Rózsa Ignácz’s historical novel Torockói gyász [‘Torockó Mourning’] (1958) deals with the staggering tragedy of Transylvanian Torockó in 1702. But the referential pattern that emerges from the dramatic plot clearly points beyond eighteenth-century time and space in partly overt and mostly covert ways: to the early twentieth-century post-Trianon fate of the Hungarians in Transylvania, and beyond, to the destructive post-1945 totalitarian communist regime in Hungary, as well as to the backlash of the 1956 anticommunist and anti-Soviet revolution and war of independence. The narrative techniques of expanding early eighteenth-century time and space will be examined through the ways in which thematic threads of collective identity are woven in the novel in general, and the customs, habits, and the religious affiliation of the community are handled in particular. Theories of Jan Assmann, Michael Bamberg, David Herman, Erving Goffman, Fritz Heider and Anselm L. Strauss as well as observations of Ignácz researchers such as Lajos Kántor, Gabriella F. Komáromi, and Erzsébet Dani will be used.

In Search of Hybridity: Grainger, MacDowell and their Cosmopolitan Imagination

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (01) ◽  
pp. 63-88
Author(s):  
Ryan Weber
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Distinct Mode ◽  
Practical Solution ◽  
Local Sources ◽  
The Common ◽  
Cultural Dialogue ◽  
Percy Grainger ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

While their names are not frequently juxtaposed in existing scholarship, Percy Grainger and Edward MacDowell both maintained that cosmopolitanism was not merely a return to eighteenth-century idealism, but also a practical solution to mediating the anxieties of their epoch. I argue that, as members of a transatlantic network of artists, their overlapping system of referents and mutual fascination with Nordic cultures was integral to the development of mutable definitions of cosmopolitanism. At the same time, the deliberate consciousness of difference that permitted for the simultaneous expansion and contraction of identities also contributed to the rise of conflicting imperatives. In the case of Grainger, certain tensions remain unresolved, including the propensity to circulate racial hierarchies under the moniker of ‘cosmopolitanism’. Therefore, in this article, I offer a methodology for appraising the common foundations of their affiliations, advance new analytical tools for evaluating the practice of ‘cosmopolitanizing’ local sources, and problematize the purported universality of their resultant discourse. By focusing upon the particular aspect of harmonic contextuality, I find that a distinct mode of hybridity emerged as they sought to distance themselves from European artistic models while in living America – one that ironically brought properties of time and space into closer proximity. This study thereby illustrates that the consequences of their cultural dialogue led to the end of anachronisms in the service of a ‘continual and restless spirit of change’.

Early Gothic Novels and the Belief in Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deidre Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Secular Culture ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Gothic Novels

This chapter looks at Gothic novels. A Gothic Romance or even ‘a Gothic Story’ may be one thing, but a Gothic Novel is something else again. Though that term has been retrospectively applied to a body of macabre, sensational, ghost-infested fiction from the late eighteenth century only since the early twentieth, in its suggestion of a perverse hybridizing of the outmoded and the up-to-date it aptly captures the transgressiveness these fictions represented for their original critics. More directly than the contemporary fictions that aspired to be life-like and observe the norms of probability, Gothic novels foreground that peculiar mental gymnastics that since the eighteenth century has enabled readers to participate in a secular culture industry ‘which invites the subtle and supple deployment of belief’. In this sense, by helping to define the frontiers of the fictive, the Gothic mode did not interrupt the rise of the novel, but instead completed it.

Les traductions françaises des Commentaires de William Blackstone à la fin du XVIIIe siècle

2020 ◽  
Vol 88 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Filippo Ranieri
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Present Contribution ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
English Law ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First Time

Summary The numerous translations through which the Commentaries on the Laws of England by William Blackstone – a milestone in the history of the common law – became known in France, and thus contributed for the first time to acquaint French jurists with English law, have been largely neglected by legal historians. The first section of the present contribution introduces the French anglophile visitors to England who, during the second half of the eighteenth century, disseminated the work of William Blackstone and its first translations in France. The biography and work of these first translators require a detailed examination. A second section assesses the influence of these translations, particularly in the legal and political debates on the English trial by jury in the context of revolutionary legislation. A third section considers the later translations of Blackstone’s work during the Napoleonic period and the following years. Finally, a call for further research outlines the impact of that translation literature.

Time on the Stage

KronoScope ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-126
Author(s):  
Erica Magnus
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The World ◽  
Individual Human ◽  
The Middle Ages

AbstractTime on the Stage - in its most pedestrian sense, the interval between an actor's entrance and exit - has also had a long history as a metaphor for an individual human life. More broadly, the theatre's imaginative conflation with the world at large, a notion of the "theatre of the world," was prevalent to the point of cliché from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century. Apart from well-worn analogy, does the detached time/space of performance have any salient relationship with quotidian experience? This study engages two moments in Western theatre history, Greece in the seventh to the fifth centuries B.C.E. when theatre first appeared, and the Middle Ages, when it reappeared in the practices of the Catholic Church after several centuries of ostensible absence. The analysis suggests that theatrical praxis emerges in response to psychic needs engendered by profound changes in notions of time and space and that performance itself, is ultimately a chronotopic technology which is mensural in nature. In the historicized stage setting and in the temporally coded body of the actor, time is found to be very much on the stage.

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