XV.—The Relation of the English “Character” to Its Greek Prototype.

PMLA ◽  
1903 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 412-423
Author(s):  
Edward Chauncey Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Periodical Essay

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.

V.—The Relation of the Seventeenth Century Character to the Periodical Essay

PMLA ◽  
1904 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-114
Author(s):  
Edward Chauncey Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Proper Form ◽  
Periodical Essay ◽  
The Individual

To say that the seventeenth century Character holds an important place in the development of prose fiction is a commonplace of criticism. That it was through the periodical essay of the eighteenth century that it influenced the development of fiction is equally well known. But the Character of the periodical essay, written by men more interested in the individual than in the type, was quite different from the old formal Character of the beginning of the seventeenth century. Through what changes it passed in the course of its development; and why it was through the periodical essay, rather than in its own proper form, that it came to exert the influence it did, are two questions which I shall attempt to answer.

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.

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.

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.

‘Carving the Complete Edition’: Self-commentary, Poetry, and Illustration in the Early-Qing Erotic Novel Romance of an Embroidered Screen (1670)

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mengjun Li
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
Erotic Novel ◽  
Chinese Fiction ◽  
Large Corpus

Scholars of late imperial Chinese fiction have demonstrated that Ming ‘literati novels’ possessed both intellectual sophistication and aesthetic seriousness. Nonetheless, the large corpus of mid-length fictional narratives of the Qing remains mired in problematic assumptions about its ostensibly popular nature. The self-commentaried edition ofEmbroidered screen(Xiuping yuan) presents a salient example for reassessing the nature of Qing novels and the reading of fiction in the seventeenth century. First circulated in manuscript copies, extensive auto-commentary was added when the novel was committed to print. The commented edition incorporates different genres—poetry, examination essay, and anecdotal accounts—as well as visual elements, all intended to appeal to elite literati tastes among Qing readers. Its literary, visual, and formal heteroglossia also contributed to its popularity in eighteenth-century Japan, which in turn secured its preservation and eventual modern rediscovery, even while it fell into obscurity in Qing China, most likely due to political censorship.

scholarly journals Sir Walter Scott, Benito Pérez Galdós y la sátira quijotesca de la erudición

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfredo Moro Martín
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Benito Perez Galdos ◽  
Dramatic Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Benito Pérez Galdós

The satire on excessive erudition counts with a long-standing tradition in Western Literature. From its Classical origins, the figure of the ridiculous erudite dunce exhibited a notable presence in the dramatic literature of the seventeenth century, being absorbed by the novel in the eighteenth, where it merges with the figure of the Quixote. The present article tries to relate the figures of Jonathan Oldbuck of Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816) and José Augusto Becerro, of Benito Pérez Galdos’ El caballero encantado (1909) with this literary archetype, revealing the profound influence of the eighteenth-century Cervantean tradition in the work of both authors, who employ the Quixotic erudite dunce in similar ways in order to satirize an outdated approach towards the study of history and its narrative embodiment.

Forms of prose

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn ◽  
Mark Lipovetsky ◽  
Irina Reyfman ◽  
Stephanie Sandler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Class ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Political Issues

This chapter charts the growing appreciation among writers and readers of prose fiction—the genre not valued by the educated eighteenth-century reader. It explores the emergence and growing popularity of historical prose, the romantic tale, and the society tale. The chapter pays particular attention to the ongoing delay in the rise of the novel. It considers the formal and thematic dimensions of the novel, treating questions of aesthetics and movements such as techniques of mimesis, the relation of realism to the movement known as Realism, and the novel’s close attention to social class and political issues Russian.

The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Criticism ◽  
Street Level ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

Eighteenth-century Britain thought of itself as a polite, sentimental, enlightened place, but often its literature belied this self-image. This was an age of satire, and the century’s novels, poems, plays, and prints resound with mockery and laughter, with cruelty and wit. The street-level invective of Grub Street pamphleteers is full of satire, and the same accents of raillery echo through the high scepticism of the period’s philosophers and poets, many of whom were part-time pamphleteers themselves. The novel, a genre that emerged during the eighteenth century, was from the beginning shot through with satirical colours borrowed from popular romances and scandal sheets. This handbook is a guide to the different kinds of satire written in English during the ‘long’ eighteenth century. It focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Outlier chapters extend the story back to first decade of the seventeenth century, and forward to the second decade of the nineteenth. The scope of the volume is not confined by genre, however. So prevalent was the satirical mode in writing of the age that this book serves as a broad and characteristic survey of its literature. The Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire seeks to reflect developments in historical criticism of eighteenth-century writing over the last two decades, and to provide a forum in which the widening diversity of literary, intellectual, and socio-historical approaches to the period’s texts can come together.

Lennox: Repertoires of Embodiment

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-106
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
Systematic Comparison ◽  
Short Forms ◽  
Literary Magazine ◽  
Embodied Language ◽  
French And English

This chapter begins with a systematic comparison of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century styles of embodied language through versions of the same narrative in French and English. Lennox’s work as a cultural broker and translator aims not only to bring narratives rooted in the seventeenth century into her contemporary literary world but also to extend their repertoires of embodied language. In her translations, she integrates instances of inner and outer bodily perception and grounds direct speech in the characters’ bodies. With Lennox’s literary magazine The Lady’s Museum, it will be shown how the novel and its embodied style are embedded in a larger world of book learning. The relations that Lennox establishes between the serialised novel, short forms like the maxim, and educational treatises document an understanding of the role of the novel that differs from the indices and abridgements around Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa.

Fictional Worlds

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Poetic Identity ◽  
New Form ◽  
Transformative Impact ◽  
Mass Hysteria

This chapter discusses the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the century, readers had little more than short continental prose fictions, or romances; by the end they had thousands of pages of invented lives and stories that were consumed in books, anthologies, part books, abridgements, and magazine instalments. The development of a tradition of extended prose fiction had a transformative impact on the landscape of literary culture at this time. Critics viewed the rise of narrative fiction as the reason for, amongst other things, a crisis in poetic identity, the rise of the solitary reader, and the development of a complex sense of self. The development of the novel also generated what now seems like bizarre mass hysteria over the uses of this new form—reading novels was thought by many to be seductive, dangerous, and enervating for those who consumed too much, too fast.

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