 Rise of the novel in the 18th century

historical background – Glorious Revolution in 1688, prominence of the middle class, rise of literacy
Ian Watt’s theory of the triple rise (rise of middle class, literacy and the novel) and its limitations
literacy predecessors in the 17th century (Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes in 1615) and dangers of
periodization
 Features of the genre:
 connection with romance
 unlike traditional literary genres, the novel sought to record and privilege the specific details that shaped
the daily lives of ordinary people
 “The novel is a genre that resists definition. It cannibalizes other literary modes and mixes the bits and pieces
promiscuously together.” (Eagleton, I)
 the novel responded to the needs and worldview of the rising middle class which was gaining financial,
cultural and political dominance in the 18th century (Ian Watt)
 diversity is one of the most dominant features of the early novel
 Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Walpole

ROMANCE MODERN NOVEL

mundane, secular (money, marriage, property,

full of marvels, supernatural elements
sex)

empirical: believes in what it can touch, smell

mythical, metaphysical
(food and physical work in R. Crusoe)

religious religious but expresses doubt

depicts a closed, symbolic universe depicts a changing world

 Readers of the novel:

 “The young, the ignorant, and the idle.” – Samuel Johnson describing, at mid-century, the readers
of novel
 pernicious influence of novels (undermining traditional authority)
 Realism – the only thing early novels have in common:
 realism in the content of the novel: traditionally associated with portrayal of low life
 realism in the form of the novel: formlessness and poverty of formal conventions, journalistic style,
episodic nature
 “it surely attempts to portray all varieties of known experience, and not merely those suited to one
particular literary perspective: the novel’s realism does not reside in the king of life it presents, but
in the way it presents it.”
 Philosophical realism:
 critical, anti-traditional and innovating, focused on the study of the particular experience by the
individual who should ideally be free from the influence of the past
 modern realism begins from the position that truth can be discovered through the senses
 Features of formal realism:
 rejection of traditional plots
 particularity as opposed to types
 naming
 time & space
 language
 Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe

 Daniel (De)foe:
 journalist, novelist, social thinker, hosier
 turbulent life and political engagement
 “professional survivor”
 “The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders” (1722)
 “The True-born Englishman” (1701)
 Robinson Crusoe and the tenets of formal realism:
 rejection of traditional plots (story of Alexander Selkirk)
 particularity as opposed to types
 naming
 time
 space
 language
 Language:
 a source of interest in its own right rather than a purely referential medium in earlier literature
 authentic language of the novel achieves immediacy and closeness to reality
 referential function of language in the novel makes it the most translatable of all genres
 Individualism:
 historical cases for the emergence of individualism – the rise of modern industrial capitalism and
the spread of Protestantism
 tradition and the Great Chain of Being VS an independent individual and freedom of choice
 Economic individualism:
 modern industrial capitalism and homoeconomicus
 profit and loss book-keeping
 “Crusoe’s book-keeping conscience” (Ian Watt)
 Colonial discourse – representation of the colonized peoples from the perspective of the European
colonizers:
 Recruiting Friday, naming and colonizing Friday, division of labor among Friday, his father and the Spaniard
means more profit and not more leisure for Crusoe
 Importance of Puritanism:
 Protestantism, self-examination, secular tone
 proactive role of the individual
 labor as a paramount religious obligation and not as a sort of punishment to Puritans
 Puritanism and realism/hatred of “fiction”
 Psychological aspect of the novel:
 the footprint scene
 terror in confronting the Other
 difference between psychology of the romance and novel
 Puritan self-examination and psychological concerns in the novel
 Robinson Crusoe – One of the myths of modern civilization:
 celebrates the triumph of the material and the power of reason
 prefigures spiritual loneliness
 Henry Fielding: Tom Jones (1749)

 Henry Fielding:
 upper-class background
 wrote comedies for the theatre
 active in law-practice, Justice of peace in London (judge)
 a Tory gentleman with traditionalist values interested in classical literacy tradition
 Tradition upheld in Tom Jones:
 “By inventing a genteel pedigree for Tom, the plot manages to unite the two lovers without
undermining the social structure, reconciling order and desire.” (Eagleton 59)
 the novel must be a variation on the past, not a rupture with it (epic, the picaresque tradition)
 Epic theory of the novel (Ian Watt):
 comic epic in prose (Preface to Joseph Andrews 1742)
 EPIC – an oral and poetic genre dealing with the public and usually remarkable deeds of historical
or legendary persons engaged in collective rather than individual enterprise; none of these things
can be said of the novel
 Traditional epic:
 action rather than individual psychology
 no moral code of conduct
 no ordinary individuals
 pagan outlook
 Fielding’s epic vs. traditional epic:
 its action is more extended and comprehensive and it contains a much larger circle of incidents and
introduces a great variety of characters
 differs from a serious romance in its action – in romance it is grave and solemn and here it is light
and ridiculous
 differs in characters by introducing persons of inferior manners unlike romance which sets out the
highest before us
 Plot:
 worked out with greatest skill – it is a job of a successful professional dramatist
 flat characters; external approach; relevance of names
 his concern is society at large, not the quality of feeling of individual characters
 plot and character subordinated to the idea of literary/dramatic unity
 omniscient narrator
 The character of Tom Jones:
 a complex mixture of animalistic and human that is essentially positive but does not embody
absolute absence of sin
 emotional artificiality as the price Fielding has to pay for his comic approach and the dominance of
the plot

Lawrence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

 Relevance of American-Irish background for Sterne’s writing

 Modernist experimentalism in Irish writing vs. the newly arising tradition of realism in English
 Irish historical contexts and Sterne’s idiosyncrasy
 Negative reception of the novel in the 1760s: Dr. Johnson said in 1776: “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram
Shandy did not last.”
 Influence of the past:
 Don Quixote (reality vs. fiction)
 Conflict between theory and practice
  Medieval tradition of tackling any problem in universe by reasoning from abstract principles and (?)
hosts of traditional authorities (Mr. Shandy)
 Medieval and Renaissance tradition of scholastic wit and metaphysical conceit (cf. Donne)
 Placing Tristram Shandy within 18th century traditions:
 anti-rationalism
 John Locke’s association of ideas
 Form and content:
 plot/form (digression and interruption vs. chronology, title, dedication) cf. Fielding
 content (hero, ideas/verbal adventures instead of episodes/proper action) cf. Defoe
 superbly comic effect (cf. Fielding)
 Characterization:
 unknown ability of people/characters in the novel (Walter Shandy, Uncle Toby, Tristram)
 hobby horses/personal obsessions vs. the notion of individualism
 Important issues raises by Sterne:
 language and its limits: non-verbal communication (drawings, blank pages, black pages, etc.)
 serious reminder of the difference between literature and life
 Limits of the novel exposed:
 the rise of the novel and “godlike powers of scrutiny” (Ricks xvii)
 omniscient narrator in Tom Jones vs “vague, half-knowledge and frustrated impotence of Tristram”
(Ricks xvii)
 Sterne as a precursor of modernist literature:
 individuals and events move in direct response to the consciousness of the author/main
protagonist – stream of consciousness (cf. Virginia Woolf)
 Affinities between Sterne and the postmodern novel:
 use of various discourses such as law, psychology, history, religion etc. to demonstrate both the
potentialities and limits of literature
 self-conscious, “metafictional” writing that is crucial to the postmodernists today
 digressions, beginnings, endings - FORM
 demystifies art as artifice and realism as just a literary style not a window into real life
 limits of words

Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto

 The Gothic – what does it mean?

 Goths
 Gothic novel – an oxymoron bringing together the past and the present
 reactionary and revolutionary
 “The Rise of the Gothic Novel” by Maggie Kilgour
 “The Rise of the Novel” by Ian Watt
 Rise of the Gothic/historical and cultural context:
 18th century – the Age of Reason/Enlightenment, Romanticism and the French Revolution
 Reason and reality were strictly limited to what could be experienced by the senses
 emergence of the Gothic as a rebellion of the imagination/emotion against the tyranny of reason
 Protestantism promoted visual asceticism and restraint which created a void in collective
imagination
 Gothic and the neoclassical ideal of order and unity
 Gothic and transgressive forms of behavior
 nostalgia for the past (the Middle Ages)
 Why does the Gothic Novel revisit the past?
 Gothic approach to the past vs. Fielding’s revival of the past
 Novel as a cannibal? Or a survivor that constantly reinvents itself?
 Novel proper vs. Gothic Novel:
 Middle class values: individualism, self-determination, getting ahead, reason, autonomy and
progress
 the gothic is part of the reaction against the political, social, scientific, industrial and
epistemological revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries which enabled the rise of the middle
class
 Modern middle-class society made up of atomistic possessive individuals who have no essential
relation to each other (cf. Robinson Crusoe)
 Gothic villain – an extreme example of modern materialistic individual
 Individualism vs. an earlier model of organic wholeness
 exploring the whole concept of individual identity to show human personality as essentially
unstable and inconsistent (Manfred)
 Novel proper preoccupied with moral issues, urge to influence behavior of an individual, tendency
to religious stability and stability of all feelings – so called protestant ethic
 Basic Gothic elements:
 characters
 setting (castle, monastery, labyrinth, basements)
 plot (usurpation)
 themes/issues (religion, family, persistence of the past, fear of being locked up within ourselves)
 supernatural phenomena
 The Castle of Otranto:
 idiosyncratic text written by a truly eccentric individual
 Strawberry Hill – a gothic mansion for a gothic author
 enigmatic publication history
 Importance of the prefaces:
 preface to the first edition attempts to pass the novel off as a genuine medieval romance
 preface to the second edition tried to define a new mode of writing initiated by the Gothic novel
 The Castle of Otranto – a blend of two types of romance
 The Castle of Otranto:
 fragmentation and loss as thematic and structural element; usurpation, ominous presence of the
past
 unnatural family relations
 unstable identities (Theodore and Manfred)
 Gothic afterlives:
 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley – Frankenstein (1818)
 Bram Stoker – Dracula (1897)
 Bronte Sisters, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens
 ... The Twilight Saga by Stephanie Meyer...