scholarly journals Robinson Crusoe på romanens tærskel

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 154-173
Author(s):  
Tue Andersen Nexø

Robinson Crusoe on the threshold of the novelJust as Ian Watt did in his classic reading of Robinson Crusoe in The Rise of the Novel, this article argues that Defoe’s well known book stands in a liminal relation to the novel as an emergent literary form. Watt argues that the liminality of Robinson Crusoe is caused by the book’s excessive thematic focus on an entrepeneurial individualism. Through an examination of the text’s discursive status at the time of publication (1719), this study argues that a more fundamental factor is the book’s relation to an emergent, but not yet established concept of fictionality. Originally, Robinson Crusoe was not read as a literary fiction, but as a book whose claim to facticity was contested. The study examines both the historical background for this difference, which is to be found in the print culture of early 18th-century London, and its hermeneutical ramifications. 

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 154-173
Author(s):  
Tue Andersen Nexø

Robinson Crusoe on the threshold of the novelJust as Ian Watt did in his classic reading of Robinson Crusoe in The Rise of the Novel, this article argues that Defoe’s well known book stands in a liminal relation to the novel as an emergent literary form. Watt argues that the liminality of Robinson Crusoe is caused by the book’s excessive thematic focus on an entrepeneurial individualism. Through an examination of the text’s discursive status at the time of publication (1719), this study argues that a more fundamental factor is the book’s relation to an emergent, but not yet established concept of fictionality. Originally, Robinson Crusoe was not read as a literary fiction, but as a book whose claim to facticity was contested. The study examines both the historical background for this difference, which is to be found in the print culture of early 18th-century London, and its hermeneutical ramifications. 


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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-114
Author(s):  
Dohal Gassim-H.

The early eighteenth century witnessed the early development of the dominant literary form of modern times, the novel. The novel emerged as a form with structure and interplay between individuals and their relationships to society. As a new form, the novel tends to make some significant, critical, and social statements about the society. Hence, the novel is used to create a new environment that is related to life and people. Indeed, this is what makes the novel appeal to readers as a new genre. Novelists either try to deal with daily social problems that happen in the lives of people or pretend that they are telling real stories. It is not surprising to find that Daniel Defoe molds his Robinson Crusoe (1719)on a real story while Samuel Richardson in Pamela (1740) turns out to be didactic to meet the needs of the growing numbers of female readers. On his part, Henry Fielding tries to expose his society to the readers in his masterpiece The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749); from now on Tom Jones. Accordingly, the novel becomes popular at this time because it has something relevant to the mob; it deals with their social life, and they can identify themselves with its characters in the actual daily life. Through Tom Jones, Fielding presented “a true and realistic picture of human nature” (Kettle, 71). As long as its main concern is the existing society, novelists feel so involved that their criticism becomes direct, frank, and effective. My paper deals with these concerns as depicted in the novels mentioned above.


Author(s):  
Svetlana A. Vatchenko ◽  

Article deals with the attempt to describe the semantic �apacity of Fielding`s last novel �Amelia� that became the notable event in writer�s biography and remains the object of discussion among the researches starting from its first publication. Fielding was at the height of his fame as the magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex and as a celebrated novelist who was an opponent of Samuel Richardson. His novel �Tom Jones� (1749) despite some harsh criticism had been generally acclaimed. According to the title �Amelia� obviously differs from Fielding�s early novels: �Joseph Andrews�, �Jonathan Wild� and �Tom Jones�. With his central heroine Fielding has entered the territory associated with Richardson, whose distressed female characters, Pamela and Clarissa, had captured the attention of the reading public. It is well-known that Amelia Booth was modelled on Fielding�s first wife, Charlotte Craddock, while his hero, Captain Booth, was inspired be the author himself as well as his father, Lieutenant General Edmund Fielding. Trying to defend �Amelia� Fielding in the Covent-Garden Journal insists that he has followed the rules for the epic of Homer and Virgil, saying that the �learned reader will see that the latter was the noble model�. Like the �Aeneid�, �Amelia� consists of twelve books, and the opening section of the novel, set in Newgate, is a parallel to Virgil. The author being in the heyday of his glory brought before the public his new, experimental text, giving up the form of comic epic poem in prose that was immortalized in �The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling�. Denying the technique that was deeply rooted in the English prose due to the narrative skill and the omniscient author (who acted as theorist of the novel), theatrically performing the game with the reader through metanarrative, Fielding in �Amelia� prefers restrained position of the narrator using the recourses of dramatical art. Choosing the plain plot about the everyday difficulties, poverty and humiliations of a young married couple that is peculiar for European sentimentalism, Fielding � due to the thematic tightness of the novel, its allusive fullness, the ambiguity of characters, the poetics of concealment � the narrative about the life of a libertine in a family (W. Scott) presents not so much as the moral lesson for the protagonist that is guided by passions but as ethical transformation that comes with the experience of the �art of life�. In recent decades �Amelia� has been the subject of many investigations, its experimental qualities made it attractive to critics of both the development of the 18th century novel and Fielding�s career. Modern readers however, have shown less interest for the work. Critical hostility to �Amelia� often seems to imply disappointment that it is not like �Tom Jones�. �Amelia� is often called a sequel to his masterpiece �Tom Jones� (Walter Scott) but Fielding adopted a new form of verisimilitude and changed his narrative technique, setting and tone. Historians agree that �Tom Jones� is loosely an epic, with a plot drawn from romance, while �Amelia� is modelled on a classical epic � Virgil�s �Aeneid� � and effects to eschew romance (Martin Battestin, Claude Rawson, Peter Sabor, Ronald Paulson, Simon Varey). The instability of reputation of Fielding�s �Amelia� demonstrates that the novel was traditionally estimated as writer�s failure but nowadays it is viewed as complicated literary form addressed to the highbrow reader. According to Peter Sabor, �Amelia� might never become the �favourite Child� of Fielding�s readers, as it was of Fielding himself, but what remains convincing about his last and most problematic novel is its harsh, world-weary picture of a venal society. Fielding�s darkened view of the people�s community influenced the later samples of the genre and reached successful treatment of the similar themes in the English novel of the 19th century. All the more it is the universal experience of the renewal of genre poetics and the reading of �Amelia� represents Fielding�s original conception of the novel. According to the declared problem the author of the present article uses historical and literary, sociocultural and hermeneutic approaches in the synthesis with the technique of close reading.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Zachary Johnson

James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner innovated several important novel genres in the Romantic literary era. The novel centers around a young man, Robert Wringhim, who, along with his devilish double, Gil-Martin, goes on a religious-based killing spree in late 17th century and early 18th century Scotland. The chronicle of Wringhim's 12 from righteousness, told by both an editor and in Robert's own words, is disturbing, ambiguous, and diabolically deceptive. I will first examine varying Scottish dialects as recorded in the book and how the interplay between them allows Hogg to represent the "many voices" of Scotland, and to challenge the notion that higher education equals virtue and goodness -- a study highly influenced by the aforementioned Bakhtinian theories. I will also examine several genres Justified Sinner both utilizes and satirizes: including gothic and horror fiction and confessions. Whereas many Romantic novels embraced the genres they found themselves in, Hogg's novel seems resistant to being confined a particular one. He plays with traits of genres to darkly humorous ends, and crafts a tale of suspense and terror that refuses to give readers closure of any tangible kinds. By manipulating what the novel should do with what it can do, Hogg asks uneasy questions about faith, spirituality, fanaticism, sin, guilt, confessing, the supernatural, and Scottish literary culture.


Author(s):  
Laura Wright

Through an examination of the politics of print culture that contributed to the 1740 continuation of Daniel Defoe’s 1724 Roxana, this essay brings the historical 18th- century playwright, novelist, and political pamphleteer Eliza Haywood into conversation with South African novelist J.M. Coetzee’s metafictional reworking of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Roxana, Foe (1986). This essay places Haywood – whose novel The British Recluse (1722) is one of at least seven pre- existing texts that make up the “pastiche” (Seager, 2009, p. 370) that constitutes the 1740 Roxana – alongside Foe’s narrator Susan Barton, a character who constitutes “a pastiche of 18th-century heroines” (Maher 39), a woman who is “doubt itself” (Coetzee 133), uncertain of who controls the truth of her narrative, yet a woman who writes back to and against the narrative established for her by her male counterparts. Susan’s story of her life as a castaway on Cruso’s island is taken from her by Foe, Coetzee’s fictionalization of Daniel Defoe, who, instead of writing her requested The Female Castaway, writes her out of the narrative that becomes Robinson Crusoe, turning her instead into the narrator of Roxana. Spivak asks, “who is the female narrator of Robinson Crusoe?” And I answer: in a somewhat playful feminist act of resurrection, Eliza Haywood. 


Author(s):  
Ruben Vanden Berghe

The ever-increasing availability of information, made possible by the Internet today, transforms the way people perceive and acquire knowledge. The following contribution maps the effects of this epistemological shift in the literary form of the novel, hypothesizing that the notion of the sublime helps us understand how literary fiction dramatizes this shift. The sublime aesthetic, which attempts to present the unpresentable, reflects the way the unfathomable scope of the Internet challenges the imagination. My narrative analysis draws on key concepts from cyberculture and media theory, such as virtuality, and links them to narrative categories such as setting, character and narration. In that way, my research will improve our understanding of how Dutch and Flemish literary fiction reflects upon the Internet and how the genre of the novel may change because of it.


2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 323-378
Author(s):  
David Allen ◽  
Briony A. Lalor ◽  
Ginny Pringle

This report describes excavations at Basing Grange, Basing House, Hampshire, between 1999 and 2006. It embraces the 'Time Team' investigations in Grange Field, adjacent to the Great Barn, which were superseded and amplified by the work of the Basingstoke Archaeological & Historical Society, supervised by David Allen. This revealed the foundations of a 'hunting lodge' or mansion built in the 1670s and demolished, and effectively 'lost', in the mid-18th century. Beneath this residence were the remains of agricultural buildings, earlier than and contemporary with the nearby Great Barn, which were destroyed during the English Civil War. The report contains a detailed appraisal of the pottery, glass and clay tobacco pipes from the site and draws attention to the remarkable window leads that provide a clue to the mansion's date of construction. It also explores a probable link with what was taking place on the Basing House site in the late 17th and early 18th century.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018/2 ◽  
pp. 31-53

DESIGNATION OF JUDICIAL DOCUMENTS IN THE THIRD STATUTE OF LITHUANIA AND THE ATTRIBUTES OF THEIR EVOLUTION ADAM STANKEVIČ The author of the article analyses the designation of documents drawn up and issued by the court, their conception, field of application, and place in the court procedure as presented in the Third Statute of Lithuania (TSL). In addition, an attempt is made to exhibit the changes that such documents and their designations underwent in later centuries (until the end of the 18th c.) by means of the example of the Lithuanian Tribunal. The research revealed that documents which in the sources from different periods were referred to by the same name meant different things or were simultaneously attributed several meanings. In the 17th-18th century, only part of the terms featured in the Third Statute of Lithuania were used in the judicial practice of the Lithuanian Tribunal, and with time some of them were replaced with other terms. Several terms denoting summonses (pozew, mandat, zakaz) can be identified in the TSL, and all of them were in use until the very end of the 18th century. However, a single term – dekret / decretum – was used to designate the judgement (actually, for some time there was a differentiation between the court judgement and its procedural summary, but later the generalized term for the judgement prevailed). A number of documents in the TSL are referred to as the “open letter”, however, later some of them acquired specialised names (e.g. the power of attorney). With time, there were certain changes in the context in which some of the terms were used (e.g. the term “cedule” which in the 18th century was already consistently used exceptionally in a particular situation, namely when a litigant refused to obey the order of the court and informed in writing a judicial officer of such refusal) or the terms themselves underwent certain changes (in the 18th century the term membran was substituted with the term blankiet). Part of the judicial documents mentioned in the TSL disappeared in the long run or there was a certain decrease in their significance (this is true of the reminder and adjournment documents as well as glejt (protection letter)). The examples above suggest that the Lithuanian Tribunal would sometimes issue reminders and guarantee documents, though legal acts did not explicitly provide for that. The TSL offered a number of terms hardly related with the investigation of a case, therefore in the early 18th century, with the improvement of judicial procedures, they underwent rapid changes. The procedure of the implementation of a court ruling, which underwent significant changes, is accountable for the introduction of new terms, for example, with time several terms pertaining to the notification of the litigants were used simultaneously (obwieszczenie, innotescencyja, list tradycyjny). Most probably due to the unification processes observed in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th century, a number of Latin origin terms were introduced in the judicial practice of the GDL, e.g. cytacyja, decyzyja, innotestencyja, plenipotencyja, obdukcyja, wizyja, inkwizycyja, weryfikacyja, kalkulacyja, tradycyja (all of them had been used in Poland but were not featured in the TSL).


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