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.

Novel Machines

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Drury
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The One

Novel Machines argues that many of the most important formal innovations in eighteenth-century fiction were critical responses to the new prominence of machines in Britain’s Industrial Enlightenment. Although narratives and machines had been seen as sharing a basic affinity since Aristotle, their relationship acquired a new urgency in the eighteenth century as authors sought to organize their narratives according to the new ideas about nature, art, and the human subject that emerged out of the Scientific Revolution. Novel Machines tracks the consequences of this effort to transform the novel into an Enlightenment machine. On the one hand, the rationalization of the novel’s narrative machinery helped establish its legitimacy, such that by the end of the century it could be celebrated as a modern ‘invention’ that provided valuable philosophical knowledge about human nature. On the other hand, conceptualizing the novel as a machine opened up a new line of attack for the period’s moralists, whose polemics against the novel were often framed in the same terms used to reflect on the uses and effects of machines in other contexts. Eighteenth-century novelists responded by adapting the novel’s narrative machinery, devising in the process some of the period’s most characteristic and influential formal innovations. Novel Machines focuses on four of these innovations: the extended representation of the deliberating mind in Eliza Haywood’s amatory fiction; Henry Fielding’s performative, self-conscious narrator; Laurence Sterne’s slow, digressive, non-linear narration; and the atmospheric descriptions of acousmatic sound in Ann Radcliffe’s gothic romances.

Voltaire, Philosopher of Human Progress

PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 356-364
Author(s):  
Virgil W. Topazio
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
Single Addition ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Popular Consent ◽  
Positive Knowledge ◽  
Separate Discipline

With the emergence of philosophy in the nineteenth century as a separate discipline which stressed primarily questions insoluble by empirical or formal methods, Voltaire's reputation as a philosopher has gone into gradual eclipse. It has become unfashionable and degrading for philosophers to concern themselves with the practical aspects of philosophical enquiry. In eighteenth-century France, on the other hand, the identification of philosophy with science, which by twentieth-century standards had vitiated philosophical thought, produced the “philosophes” or natural philosophers who were on the whole more interested in human progress than in the progress of the human mind. And Voltaire was by popular consent the leader of this “philosophe” group, the one who had unquestionably contributed the most in the struggle to make man a happier and freer member of society. Yet, ironically, despite a lifelong effort in behalf of humanity, Voltaire's reputation as a destructive thinker has steadily grown even as the critics have pejoratively classified him as a “practical” rather than a “real” philosopher. Typical of this criticism of Voltaire is Macaulay's statement: “Voltaire could not build: he could only pull down: he was the very Vitruvius of ruin. He has bequeathed to us not a single doctrine to be called by his name, not a single addition to the stock of our positive knowledge.”

Concept of Rivalry in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-454
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Attachment Theory ◽  
Sibling Rivalry ◽  
Oedipus Complex ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Qualitative Pattern ◽  
The One ◽  
Theory Competition

Sons and Lovers (1913) is one of D.H. Lawrence’s most prominent novels in terms of psychological complexities characteristic of most, if not all, of his other novels. Many studies have been conducted on the Oedipus complex theory and psychological relationship between men and women in Lawrence’s novels reflecting the early twentieth century norms of life. This paper reexamines Sons and Lovers from the perspective of rivalry based on Alfred Adler’s psychological studies. The discussion tackles the sibling rivalry between the members of the Morels and extends to reexamining the rivalry between other characters. This concept is discussed in terms of two levels of relationships. First, between Paul and William as brothers on the one hand, and Paul and father and mother, on the other. Second, the rivalry triangle of Louisa, Miriam and Mrs. Morel. The qualitative pattern of the paper focuses on the textual analysis of the novel to show that Sons and Lovers can be approached through the concept of rivalry and sibling Rivalry. Keywords: Attachment theory, Competition, Concept of Rivalry, Favoritism, Sibling rivalry.

Capability Jane

2020 ◽  
pp. 210-250
Author(s):  
Mike Goode
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Landscape Design ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ecological Consciousness ◽  
Mansfield Park ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Humphry Repton ◽  
The One

The chapter contends that Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, through its rhetorical and conceptual overlaps with eighteenth-century landscape design, does not align its realist project with representing reality so much as with revealing reality’s capabilities, thereby associating Austenian realism metaphysically and medially with the ecological consciousness and experimentation of landscaping. Contrary to familiar leftist critiques of landscape gardening’s political meanings and abhorrent social effects, the chapter uncovers the conceptual overlaps between, on the one hand, the ecological consciousness and design vocabulary of eighteenth-century landscape theorists like Humphry Repton and Richard Payne Knight, and, on the other hand, contemporary formalism and Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the virtuality extant in any reality. The chapter then traces how Mansfield Park reworks this ecological consciousness and design vocabulary (affordances, allowances, capabilities), arguing that Austen theorizes the novel form as a design medium wherein narrative is just a contingent ecological experiment.

Rigidities in the Labour Market

1988 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 395-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Dore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Compulsory Education ◽  
The Other ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
Freedom Of Contract ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One

THE STEADY EXPANSION OF THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT and its increasingly interventionist role in the economy has for much of the twentieth century seemed an inexorable and irreversible trend. The jurist, Dicey, already saw it as such at the beginning of the century. In a famous series of lectures, he traced the retreat of Benthamite individualist liberalism in the face of what he called ‘collectivism’. The common theme in all the developments he considered — the protection given to trade unions on the one hand, compulsory education and municipal trading on the other — was their limitation of the freedom of contract, the limitation of — the buzz-word of British politics in the late 1980s — ‘choice’.

scholarly journals Потенциал иронии в творчестве Людмилы Петрушевской (на примере романа Нас украли. История преступлений)

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Юлия Брюханова
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Significant Element ◽  
Philosophical Aspect ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One

Many researchers of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s works draw attention to the irony which is the significant element of her prose, drama and poetry. It is important that the ironic principle manifests itself not only as an artistic technique but also as a philosophical aspect. Irony demonstrates the ambivalence of reality. On the one hand, it ridicules and profanes everything. On the other hand, irony gives the certitude of the ontological status of reality. We can see a good example of this function of irony in the novel Nas ukrali. Istoriya prestupleniy (2017). This novel shows the common features of Petrushevskaya’s works – the unity of ironic potential and language. In this case, language is not only the style but first of all the ontological element. This is why the language becomes almost a character in Petrushevskaya’s novel. Irony opens the vital potential of the linguistic personality. As a result, one of the heroes imitates foreign speech but doesn’t speak a foreign language. Irony also helps to reveal the ambivalent nature of life. It shows that our “umora” in Sanskrit and in ancient Indian is “humour” and “death”. So, the game and profanity not only reduce the status of the hero, the image, or the reader’s expectations but, first of all, fill the gap between words, ideas, feelings, and people.

scholarly journals ‘I felt a noble shock’: James Boswell in German Princely Courts

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 87
Author(s):  
Markku Kekäläinen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The Other ◽  
Court Culture ◽  
Positive View ◽  
James Boswell ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One ◽  
British Court

The article deals with James Boswell’s (1740–1795) attitudes towards the courtly milieu in the context of eighteenth-century British court discourse. The central argument is that, strongly contrary to the anti-court ethos of his intellectual and social milieu, Boswell had an affirmative and enthusiastic attitude towards the court. Moreover, the fact that he was neither an Addisonian moralist ‘spectator’ nor a cynical court aristocrat like Lord Chesterfield, but in many senses a highly affective ‘man of feeling’ of the age, did not diminish the uniqueness of his positive view of court culture. On the one hand, Boswell’s appreciation of the court was connected with his firm monarchism and belief in hereditary rank; on the other hand, he was aesthetically fascinated by the splendour and magnificence of the courtly milieu. His appraisal of the court did not include the common-sense moralism of the moral weeklies or the cynical observations of the  aristocratic court discourse; rather his attitude was immediate, emotional, and enthusiastic in the spirit of the cult of sensibility.

At the Door of the Theater: Kafka’s Oklahama Theater and the Nature Theater Movement

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-123
Author(s):  
Marit Grøtta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Thin Line ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The One ◽  
Historical Nature

Abstract The Nature theater of Oklahama in Der Verschollene is one of Kafka’s most enigmatic inventions, widely known through Walter Benjamin’s and Giorgio Agamben’s reading of it as a theater of gestures. This article explores the intertextual archive of Kafka’s novel, bringing into play an entry hitherto overlooked: the nature theater movement in the early twentieth century, promoted by the conservative Heimatkunstbewegung. Discussing the historical nature theater, on the one hand, and Benjamin’s and Agamben’s theater of gestures, on the other, the article examines the conceptions of life that come into play in the novel (life as career, life as theater, life as gesture) and considers the fate of the protagonist in this light. Seeing the question of inclusion/exclusion as key to Kafka’s novel, the article argues that it exposes the thin line between utopia and dystopia and allows us to reflect on the dangers as well as the possibilities of modernity.

Miłosz i Lévinas – modernistyczny dwugłos o zadaniach literatury

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-180
Author(s):  
Marcin Telicki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The Other ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Philosophical Reflection ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
Liminal Experiences ◽  
Century Literature

Summary The article examines a parallel between Emmanuel Lévinas’s and Czesław Miłosz’s philosophical reflection about the duties of literature. The common ground can be found in Lévinas’s well-known idea of encountering the Other through the Face. This form of communication, which is by no means easy, is given extra depth by liminal experiences of transience and death. As the examples from the second part of this article show these experiences seem to mark the greatest achievements of twentieth-century literature. Finally, the question is asked about the two writers’ views on the place of philosophy and reflection on transcendence. Even though they do not see eye to eye on these points, the plurality of values and judgments expressed by them should not compel us to classify their work as completely disparate and incomparable.

Muslim-Christian Dialogue in Peyami Safa's The Armchair of Mademoiselle Noraliya

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-104
Author(s):  
Sureyya Elif Aksoy ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Interreligious Dialogue ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Peace Of Mind ◽  
Unique Position ◽  
The Common ◽  
Islam And Christianity

Peyami Safa, a twentieth-century novelist, journalist and intellectual, and one of the major personalities of conservatism in Turkey, encouraged Muslim and Christian believers to search for common ground and shared values that would yield a happy, virtuous way of life. His novel, The Armchair of Mademoiselle Noraliya, features character, Noraliya, who epitomizes the common ground between Islam and Christianity as a guide to peace of mind for individuals lost in the maze of modemity. Safa's literary construct is rooted in both religious inclination and admiration for the modem mind. Drawing on the main elements of the novel, this essay focuses on those features that reflect Safa's idea of a personal mysticism reached through religion, as well as interreligious dialogue, Safa's approach exemplifies Turkey's unique position in the Muslim world, inviting comparison arui appreciation of the nuances among the historical manifestations of Islam.

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