Shaping the Verisimilitude: Moral Didacticism and Neoclassical Principles Responsible for the Rise of the English Novel?

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-218
Author(s):  
Petru Golban
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Concern ◽  
Major Aspect ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Literary System

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.

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.

Literature and Translation

Babel ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eterio Pajares
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Target Language ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Spanish Translation ◽  
Stepping Stone ◽  
English Novel ◽  
International Language ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
European Languages

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.

Making Publics and Making Novels

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Cowan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Structural Transformation ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Public ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Political Partisanship ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere

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.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Josephine McDonagh
Keyword(s):  
British Literature ◽  
World Wide ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Impact

The increased extent and rapidity of migration was a world-wide phenomenon in the nineteenth century and forms the context of a dynamic period in the history of the English novel. Although British literature often seems unwilling to represent migration, nevertheless the form of the novel in this period is shaped in the context of the frenetic transcontinental movement of people. The common denominator of migration and fiction in this period is print, which, in this period, through new technologies was cheaper and more easily produced. Print helped to stimulate and sustain migration through the production of information for emigrants. Moreover, the development of printing presses in settler colonies stimulated important new readerships especially for fiction, which flourished as a consequence. Fictions in this period show the impact of increased human mobility in both their themes, and their formal attributes. They interrogate questions that are provoked by colonization and mass mobility, regarding community, freedom, democracy, and displacement; and they develop an aesthetic that is characterized by an emphasis on contiguity, and adjacent relations.

“The Grease of God”: The Form of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

PMLA ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 91 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melvyn New
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Secular World ◽  
Secular Age

Recent criticism of the eighteenth-century English novel points to a providential world view as the “proper conceptual context” for these fictions, but it would be an error to see the fictions of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett as uniformly or unhesitatingly committed to the providential order. These authors constructed fictions, characters, and structures in response to the historical actuality of the age, in transition from the Christian to the secular world view. It is this transition and its effect on the providential world view that provide the conceptual context for the fiction of this period. Critics, having recognized the novel as the fictional form of a secular age, must also recognize the significance of the romance as that fictional form best depicting the providential order. In eighteenth-century English fiction the romance is gingerly displaced from the theoretical center of narrative by elements of form now identified with the novel.

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.

Foreign Imports

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Mander
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Sense ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English Novel ◽  
General Decline ◽  
Imaginative Literature ◽  
British Novelists ◽  
At Home

This chapter examines foreign novels, which greatly overshadowed the English novel. The prevalence of imitations and translations of foreign novels had been a matter of significant critical concern throughout the first half of the eighteenth century and contemptuously identified by many a censorious reviewer as a corrupting influence on both the morals and letters of the nation. By the middle of the century, however, there was a strong sense that the English novel had come of age; and as British novelists progressively consolidated their position both at home and abroad, readers became decreasingly dependent on foreign fiction. Nonetheless, non-native fiction remained a convenient focus for multiple anxieties relating to the genre of the novel and its commercialization. For while the overall picture for 1750–1820 as regards imported imaginative literature was one of general decline, many foreign novelists continued to compete successfully for the attention of the British public.

Celebrity and Scandalous Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clara Tuite
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
English Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Italian Novel

This chapter studies scandalous fiction. One way of registering how scandal fiction might figure in a revised history of the novel is to consider scandal fiction as embodying everything that the polite novel sought to repudiate or disavow: criminality, sexuality, sensation, vulgarity, voyeurism, and reflexivity. For just as the novel genre itself is a scandal for much of the eighteenth century, the increasing respectability of the novel genre from the 1750s is predicated upon the move away from forms such as romans á clef and chroniques scandaleuses. Indeed, the English novel starts to define itself as a national genre against the scandalous excesses of the French or Italian novel—which it often does while exploiting and purveying these foreign excesses. This is particularly the case with the most scandalous forms of fiction: pornography and erotic fiction.

Narrating ‘the modern’: Colonial-era southern Batak journalism and novelistic fiction as overlapping literary forms

2008 ◽  
Vol 163 (4) ◽  
pp. 476-506
Author(s):  
Susan Rodgers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Evolutionary Models ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Early English

As Lennard J. Davis (1997) points out in Factual fictions; The origins of the English novel, newspaper prose and novel writing had remarkably blurred boundaries throughout the late 1700s, the time when the early English novel was first gaining public currency on the popular print scene. Davis presents a complex argument. He first criticizes Ian Watt’s approach (1957) as set out in the latter’s classic The rise of the novel. Davis asserts that Watt relies on simplistic ‘evolutionary’ models about the ‘rise’ of genres. Davis goes on to observe that there was a generalized convergence of discursive forms in the English popular press and in storytelling in commercial print in the late eighteenth century.

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