THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The Rise of the Novel

THE ENLIGHTENMENT – THE ‘AGE OF REASON’
➢The Eighteenth century is associated with the Enlightenment – the ‘Age of Reason’ – although, for some
scholars, the Enlightenment spans from the late 17th century to the ending of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815
(the ‘long’ 18th century).

➢ The Enlightenment was a movement which, viewing reason as the primary source of knowledge and
legitimacy, sought to question traditional forms of authority (including religion and the divine right of
monarchs) and vindicated the idea that humanity could be improved through reasoning and rational change
(human perfectibility). This movement advocated such ideals as liberty, progress, tolerance, and separation of
church and state.
➢The ideals of the Enlightenment directly inspired the American and French Revolutions.

➢ Key principles of the Enlightenment:

➢ Belief in human reason [Enlightenment ideals often came into conflict with religion]
➢ Belief in the scientific method
➢ Progress, freedom, equality

John Locke, one of the key figures of the Enlightenment.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT & NEOCLASSICISM
➢Many Enlightenment thinkers and artists found inspiration in the civilisations of
ancient Greece and Rome (as opposed to the ‘dark ages’ - ‘middle ages’). Those RULES of old discovered, not devised,
Are Nature still, but Nature Methodized;
➢ In literature and the arts, the eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of Nature, like Liberty, is but restrained
By the same Laws which first herself ordained.
Neoclassicism – a movement that drew inspiration from the art and culture of
classical antiquity. Alexander Pope

➢In fact, the literature produced in Britain during the first part of the eighteenth
century is known as ‘Augustan literature’ – a term that alludes to the age of the
Roman emperor Augustus.

Later in the eighteenth century and as we shall see in future units, Neoclassicism
began to enter in conflict with the Enlightenment spirit of freedom due to its
artificiality and constrictive rules of harmony and symmetry. The emergence of NEOCLASSICAL GARDEN
Romanticism in literature and the arts can be seen as a reaction against
Neoclassicism.
 Aphra Behn’s
Oroonoko, or the
Royal Slave (1688)

Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
(1719)

THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

 Origins and antecedents of the novel in Great Britain and
Ireland. TWO MAIN THEORIES

Historicist Explanation. Formalist Explanation.

(I. Watt, The Rise of the (N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism,
Novel, 1957) 1957)
 The Rise of the Novel - Historicist Explanation

➢Industrial Revolution
➢Consolidation of a middle class
➢Development of urban life (next slides)
➢Increase of leisure time
➢Popularity of periodicals (the “middle style”) (next slides)
➢Increase in literacy
➢Circulating libraries
➢A taste for realism
COFFEE HOUSES
 Boudoirs
File:A Boudoir (Louis XVI. Period).jpg
Newspapers:
The Oxford Gazette (1665), later The London Gazette (1666)
The Tatler (founded by Richard Steele in 1709)
The Spectator (1711)
Morning Chronicle (1769)
The Morning Post (1772)
The Times (1785) [Initially named Daily Universal Registrar]
The Observer (1791)
Bell’s Weekly Messenger (1796)
The Political Register (1802)
The Globe (1803)
The Examiner (1710-11) – Tory
The great number of newspapers appearing at the time demonstrates The Tatler (1709-11) & The
the growing concern of the middle classes with domestic and foreign Spectator (1711-12) – Whig
affairs. These questions were no longer the sole interest of the nobility
and upper classes.
‘One of the first periodicals written primarily for, though not aimed
solely at, an audience of women, the Female Tatler charmed early
eighteenth-century Londoners with its lively wit and scathing satire. In
circulation for less than one year (1709-1710), it nevertheless marks an
important point in magazine publication history and in female
authorship and readership. Purportedly written by a Mrs.
Crackenthorpe and then taken over by a “Society of Ladies”-the Female
Tatler is often passed over, especially in relation to its counterpart and
inspiration, Richard Steele’s periodical the Tatler.’

https://public.websites.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/female_tatle
r/index.html
CIRCULATING
LIBRARIES
The Rise of the Novel - Formalist Explanation

Antecedents in the English literary tradition

Antecedents in the European literary tradition

The Novel – 1) Antecedents in the English literary tradition

➢ Notice that, in the English literary tradition, there are examples of prose writing
that go back to the Middle Ages (legends, sermons) – see Unit 2. In the
Renaissance Period (Unit 3), we find more sophisticated examples such as
Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594); and in the 17th century (Unit 4),
we find texts that have often been considered as the main antecedents to the
English novels such as autobiographies and travelogues.

➢ Clearest Antecedents:

➢Diaries and (auto)biographies

➢ Margaret Cavendish’s A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and
Life(1656)
➢Criminal / spiritual autobiographies
➢ John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678-1684) → religious
allegory in which a character, named Christian, seeks salvation.
The Novel – 2) Antecedents in the Continental Literary Tradition

➢Miguel de Cervantes’s The Quixote (1605-1615)

➢ The Picaresque Novel → a novel with a ‘picaro/a’ – rogue or
scoundrel – as its main protagonist. The ‘picaro/a’ usually belongs to
the low social classes and manages to survive, thanks to his/her wits,
in a corrupt society. The picaresque novel is often structured as a
succession of episodes which depict the adventures of the picaro/a in
the first person and in a realistic tone.
 ▪ A novel is a novel ‘if it is in prose, and if it is of a

What is a certain length’ (Doody 1)

▪‘‘The truth is tha the novel is a genre that resists exact
‘novel’? definition.’ / ‘The poing about the novel is not just
that it eludes definitions, but that it actually
undermines them. It is less a genre tan an anti-genre.
It cannibalises other literary modes and mixes the bits
and pieces promiscously together’ (Eagleton, The English Novel:
An Introduction, 1)
What Is a Novel …? FEATURES
1.Contemporaneity.
2.Credibility and probability.
3.Familiarity.
4.Rejection of traditional plots.
5.Tradition-free language.
6.Individualism, subjectivity.
7.Empathy.
8.Coherence and unity of design.
9.Inclusivity, digressiveness, fragmentation.
10. Self-consciousness
(J. Paul Hunter)
Novel - New
➢‘Novel’ meaning ‘new’ (‘new genre’)
➢New(e)s vs. Novels
➢ In the 16th century the word newes was applied freely too writings which described either true or fictional events
(particularly in publications in periodicals). The dichotomy ‘fact vs. fiction’ became entangled at the time and this was
something the novel inherited. The epistemological confusion between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’ is an intrinsic characteristic of
the novel as a literary genre which manifested itself differently throughout the course of history.

Aphra Ben’s Oroonoko, Or the History of the Royal Slave (1688), Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Adventures of Robison
Crusoe (1719), Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1747-8), Henry Fielding’s The History
of Tom Jones, A Founding (1749).

Many of the novels here listed include the term

‘history’ in their titles. Why?
THE RISE OF THE NOVEL
➢As noted in previous slides, many early novels featured the word ‘history’ in their titles. There are at least
two possible explanations:
➢ ‘History’→ Anglicised version of the French term for story – ‘historie’
➢‘History’ → Verisimilitude → ‘novel’ = new (lacking prestige)

➢ It is worth noting that the novel, as a new form of writing, was not considered an important or prestigious
genre at the time and, for that reason, some writers added the label ‘history’ to the works, making a claim
to truth that was, in itself, a fiction:
➢ Drama and poetry were amongst the most valued genres
➢Novels were considered to be ‘too easy to read’ and also ‘bad for readers’
➢Genre & genre

In its origins, the novel was bound to the notions of realism and verosimilitude
The “Mothers” of the Novel
Aphra Behn, Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684-87)
Oronooko, or the Royal Slave (1688)
Delarivier Manley, The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians (1705)
The New Atalantis (1709)
Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess (1720)
The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751)
Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple (1744), The Governess (1749)
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, or the Adventures of Arabella (1752)
The “Fathers” of the Novel
Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Captain Singleton (1720)
Moll Flanders (1722)
Roxana (1724)
Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740)
Clarissa (1747-1748)
Henry Fielding, Shamela (1741), Joseph Andrews (1742),
Jonathan Wild (1743), Tom Jones (1749)
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759-1767)
 SEMINAR CLASS

Analysis of excerpts from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Aphra Behn’s Oronooko (1688)

See texts and instructions on the course page

 ➢Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)
Laurence Sterne, - Irish author
Tristram Shandy
➢ The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman (1759-1767)
➢ Narrated in the first person
➢Highly experimental novel
➢ Plays with the conventions
associated with the emerging
eighteenth-century novel
➢ Full of digressions (Tristram
never gets to tells his story)
➢ Use of meta-language
Laurence Sterne, ➢Beginning
Tristram Shandy
➢Early realist novels often began by providing information about the
protagonist (origins, family, ancestors). See Robinson Crusoe: ‘I was born in
the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that
country, my father being a foreigner’

➢ In Tristram Shandy, Sterne subverts (even mocks) this convention and has
Tristram (the main character and narrator) ‘retelling’ his story ab ovo –
that is, from the moment of his begetting.

➢ In the following excerpt, we can see how Tristram refers humorously to

the moment in which his parents conceived him: ‘they were in duty’. At
that point, his mother interrupted the sexual act by asking a question
about the clock. Tristram blames his misfortunes (in terms of body and
mind) on the careless behaviour of his parents (they were not as
concentrated on the act as they should!)

➢ Notice that the story begins, therefore, before his birth (Volume I),
but his birth is not retold until Volume III – at that point, the reader
would have already spent approx. 130 pages reading the work!
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both
equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly
consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the
production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and
temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught
they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the
humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and
considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have
made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see
me.—Believe me, good folks, this is not so inconsiderable a thing as many of you may think
it;—you have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused from
father to son, &c. &c.—and a great deal to that purpose:—Well, you may take my word, that
nine parts in ten of a man's sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this
world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracks and trains you put
them into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, 'tis not a half-
penny matter,—away they go cluttering like hey-go mad; and by treading the same steps over
and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk,
which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive
them off it.
Pray my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?—Good G..! cried
my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,—
Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?
Pray, what was your father saying?—Nothing. (Chapter 1, volume 1)
Laurence Sterne,
Tristram Shandy ➢Development

➢Rather than a progression of events, the novel is a succession of

‘opinions’ on the most diverse topics, including Tristram’s and other
character’s “hobby-horses” (obsessions).
➢ The novel is full of digressions, interruptions, stories-within the story, and
quotations from the most diverse sources. This prevents the plot from
advancing, something that Tristram, as the narrator, acknowledges, as we
can see in the following page
Laurence Sterne, Tristram, the narrator, constantly addresses and urges his readers to be
Tristram Shandy patient with him and to continue reading:

In the beginning of the last chapter, I informed you exactly when I was
born; but I did not inform you how. No, that particular was reserved
entirely for a chapter by itself;—besides, Sir, as you and I are in a
manner perfect strangers to each other, it would not have been proper
to have let you into too many circumstances relating to myself all at
once. —You must have a little patience. I have undertaken, you see, to
write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that
your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by
the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed
farther with me, the slight acquaintance, which is now beginning
betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that unless one of us is in
fault, will terminate in friendship

Meta-language
Laurence Sterne, Tristram is constantly addressing the reader (both male and female) –
Tristram Shandy use of the vocative ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’ – and making comments about
the very process of writing (meta-language). At times he even involves
the reader by leaving blank pages for the reader to write notes or even
paint. For example, when he is referring to his uncle’s beloved, Widow
Wadman, instead of describing her, Tristram urges the reader to paint
his/her own portrait of this lady and we are given some space
NOVELS VS. ROMANCES
 Novels vs. Romances in Great Britain and Ireland.

William Congreve’s Incognita; or, Love and Duty Reconcil’d: A Novel (1692)

“Romances are generally composed of the Constant Loves and invincible Courages of Hero’s,
Heroines, Kings and Queens, Mortals of the first Rank, and so forth; where lofty Language,
miraculous Contingencies and impossible Performances, elevate and surprise the Reader into
a giddy Delight, which leaves him flat upon the Ground wherever he gives of, and vexes him to
think how he has suffer’d himself to be pleased and transported, concerned and afflicted at
the several Passages which he hath Read, viz. these Knights success to their Damosels
Misfortunes, and such like, when he is forced to be very well convinced that ‘is all a lye.
Novels are of a more familiar nature; Come near us, and represent to us Intrigues in practice,
delight us with accidents and odd events, but not such as are wholly unsual or
unpresidented.” (ii-iii)

Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (2 vols., 1785)

“The Romance is an heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and things. –The Novel is a
picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written. The Romance in lofty
and elevated language, describes what never happened nor is likely to happen. –The Novel
gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen
to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and
natural a manner, and to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion (at
least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses, of the
persons in the story, as if they were our own.” (I. 111)
ROMANCES NOVELS

1. Set in a distant, idealised past 1.Set in a more recent, less heroic,

setting
2. Based on the epic
2.Modeled on history and journalism
3. Set in a remote and exotic
location 3.Usually set in the locale of the author,
a national form of literature
4. Depict the life of the aristocracy 4.More middle-class and less aristocratic
and designed for an upper-class readership
reader
5.Shorter and more compact of plot
5. Long and episodic
6.Tend to focus on illegal doings and
6. Value the preservation of virtue forbidden passions
and chastity
7.Written in first person or in letter
7. Written in 3rd person form

8. Mix fact and fiction 8.Tend to deny they are fictional

9. Follow the rules of bienseance 9.Reject these rules since they claim to
be writing history or recording life as it
and vraisemblance is.
‘Preface’ to Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722)
The world is so taken up of late with novels and romances,
that it will be hard for a private history to be taken for
genuine, where the names and other circumstances of the
person are concealed, and on this account we must be content
to leave the reader to pass his own opinion upon the ensuing
sheet, and take it just as he pleases.
The author is here supposed to be writing her own history, and
in the very beginning of her account she gives the reasons why
she thinks fit to conceal her true name, after which there is no
occasion to say any more about that.
NOVELS VS. ROMANCES
The GOTHIC
 Gothic
NEOCLASSICISM Reaction against
Romanticism
(Enlightenment, Reason)
(Imagination)

D. Defoe’s H. Walpole’s The W. Worthsworth’s

Robinson Crusoe Castle of Otrato Lyrical Ballads
(1719) (1764) (1798)

Realist Novel Gothic Romance Romanticism

Novels vs. Gothic Romances The Castle of Otranto (1764), by
Horace Walpole is often credited
with being the first Gothic novel.
Walpole applied the term ‘Gothic’
to his novel The Castle of Otranto,
subtitled as ‘A Gothic Story’.

*Notice that this text was

published just some decades after
one of the first novels (realist
novels) in English: Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe (1719).

Gothic Literature reacts against

the emphasis on reason that
marked the Enlightement and also
Neoclassicism. Gothic literature
invests in the imagination, hidden
passions and the supernatural.
 Gothic Fiction
Gothic fiction displays “the underside of enlightenment and humanist values. Gothic condenses the many perceived
threats to these values, threats associated with supernatural and natural forces, imaginative excesses and
delusions, religious and human evil, social transgression, mental disintegration and spiritual corruption […]
Gothic writing remains fascinated by objects and practices that are constructed as negative, irrational, immoral and
fantastic.” (Botting, 1996: 1)

“Certain stock features provide the principal embodiments and evocations of cultural anxieties. Tortuous,
fragmented narratives relating mysterious incidents, horrible images and life-threatening pursuits predominate
in the eighteenth century. Spectres, monsters, demons, corpses, skeletons, evil aristocrats, monks and nuns,
fainting heroines and bandits populate Gothic landscapes as suggestive figures of imagined and realistic
threats. This list grew, in the nineteenth century, with the addition of scientists, fathers, husbands, madmen,
criminals and the monstrous double signifying duplicity and evil nature.” (Botting, 1996: 1-2)

Fred Botting. 1996. Gothic. London:Routledge

• The term ‘Gothic’ in the 18th century → ‘barbarous’, ‘medieval’, ‘supernatural’ 1
→ H. Walpole applied the term ‘Gothic’ to his novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled as ‘A Gothic Story’.

• Classic Gothic Fiction in English Literature → period from 1764 to 1820.

• First wave → pre-romantic Gothic
• Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)
• William Beckford’s Vathek (1786)
• Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
• Mathew G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796)
• Second wave → turn to introspection; influence of Romanticism
• M Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)
• J. W. Polidori’s The Vampire (1819)
• C. R. Maturin’s Melmoth, the Wanderer (1820)

→ The Gothic legacy continued, nonetheless, during the Victorian period with works such as R. L.
Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891), Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Also in the work of
Edgar Allan Poe.
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GOTHIC FICTION

• Ingredients of Gothic fiction → mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, monsters,

vampires, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets and hereditary curses.

• Settings: haunted houses, castles, abbeys, ruins; far-away places (associated with
primitivism)

• Time: ‘Time for the realist novel tends to be linear and one-dimensional;
whereas time for the Gothic […] is often doubled, as the novel delves into the
ancient past as a way of illuminating the present and the future, or as that past
lingers fearfully on within the present in the form of spectres’ (Eagleton, 2005:
100)

• Aesthetics of excess → the aesthetics of the Gothic is an aesthetics of excess

(of passion over reason, of the supernatural and of fantasy over realism, of
ornament in style over plain style)

• Ambivalence → Cautionary tale, disturbing narrative; The gothic has been

considered both conservative and subversive (Punter 1996: 12-18), politically and
morally ambivalent (Botting, 1996).
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GOTHIC FICTION *Notice that ideas such as the
‘sublime’ as well as the
emphasis on ‘imagination’ so
• Terror vs. Horror→ terror (inspiring) vs. horror (paralyising) →
important in Gothic literature
are also key to much Romantic
‘Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul literatura (next unit)
and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts,
freezes and nearly annihilates them’ (Ann Radcliffe, ‘On the
Supernatural in Poetry,’ 1826, pp 145–52)

• Terror and the sublime (the sublime and the beautiful)→ ‘When
danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight
and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain
modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we everyday
experience’ // Pain and terror ‘are capable of producing delight; not
pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged
with terror’. Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) (2015: 34)
 Gothic Fiction and Criticism
Negative interpretation (popular culture, a curiosity)
Postive interpretations (from the 1980s and 1990s):
-Literature with a veiled (indirect) message: a warning against certain societies and communities /
a vindication of freedom and passion.

◦ WOMEN AND THE GOTHIC

 SEMINAR CLASS

Analysis of excerpts from The Castle of Otranto (1764), by Horace Walpole

See texts and instructions on the course page