Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English FictionYale University Press, 1.10.2008 - 320 sivua In this study intended for general readers, eminent critic Patricia Meyer Spacks provides a fresh, engaging account of the early history of the English novel. Novel Beginnings departs from the traditional, narrow focus on the development of the realistic novel to emphasize the many kinds of experimentation that marked the genre in the eighteenth century before its conventions were firmly established in the nineteenth. Treating well-known works like Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy in conjunction with less familiar texts such as Sarah Fielding’s The Cry (a kind of hybrid novel and play) and Jane Barker’s A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (a novel of adventure replete with sentimental verse and numerous subnarratives), the book evokes the excitement of a multifaceted and unpredictable process of growth and change. Investigating fiction throughout the 1700s, Spacks delineates the individuality of specific texts while suggesting connections among novels. She sketches a wide range of forms and themes, including Providential narratives, psychological thrillers, romans à clef, sentimental parables, political allegories, Gothic romances, and many others. These multiple narrative experiments show the impossibility of thinking of eighteenth-century fiction simply as a precursor to the nineteenth-century novel, Spacks shows. Instead, the vast variety of engagements with the problems of creating fiction demonstrates that literary history—by no means inexorable—might have taken quite a different course. |
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Tulokset 1 - 5 kokonaismäärästä 59
Sivu 6
... kind of fact . The literary situation reflected actualities of the society at large . In earlier times writers of verse and prose had profited from a system of patronage : wealthy men and women , usually aristocrats , bestowed gifts and ...
... kind of fact . The literary situation reflected actualities of the society at large . In earlier times writers of verse and prose had profited from a system of patronage : wealthy men and women , usually aristocrats , bestowed gifts and ...
Sivu 8
... kind of richly populated, “realistic” works popu- larized by Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett. As we shall see, women were major experimenters, and they had a large contemporary audience. By late in the century, lending libraries had ...
... kind of richly populated, “realistic” works popu- larized by Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett. As we shall see, women were major experimenters, and they had a large contemporary audience. By late in the century, lending libraries had ...
Sivu 9
... kind of female activity. During the reign of George III (1760–1820), the population of Great Britain almost doubled, from seven and a half million to more than four- teen million. The probable reason for the increase was that more ...
... kind of female activity. During the reign of George III (1760–1820), the population of Great Britain almost doubled, from seven and a half million to more than four- teen million. The probable reason for the increase was that more ...
Sivu 16
... kind of fiction more closely related to its readers ' experience . Aphra Behn's Oroonoko ( 1688 ) , like Bunyan's work greatly popular , employed a romance hero in the form of an African prince , experimenting with setting and character ...
... kind of fiction more closely related to its readers ' experience . Aphra Behn's Oroonoko ( 1688 ) , like Bunyan's work greatly popular , employed a romance hero in the form of an African prince , experimenting with setting and character ...
Sivu 17
... kind of intricate suggestiveness more often associated with the later novel. It achieves its energy partly by a structure that places constant emphasis on the narrator's situation, reminding us (as many later novels would also do) that ...
... kind of intricate suggestiveness more often associated with the later novel. It achieves its energy partly by a structure that places constant emphasis on the narrator's situation, reminding us (as many later novels would also do) that ...
Sisältö
28 | |
58 | |
4 Novels of Consciousness | 92 |
5 The Novel of Sentiment | 126 |
6 The Novel of Manners | 160 |
7 Gothic Fiction | 190 |
8 The Political Novel | 222 |
9 Tristram Shandy and the Development of the Novel | 254 |
What Came Next | 276 |
Suggestions for Further Reading | 286 |
Works Cited | 292 |
Index | 298 |
Muita painoksia - Näytä kaikki
Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction Patricia Meyer Spacks Rajoitettu esikatselu - 2008 |
Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-century English Fiction Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks Esikatselu ei käytettävissä - 2006 |
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action adventure appears behavior Caleb Williams calls attention Camilla century chapter characters claims Clarissa concern consciousness conventions conveys crucial David Simple death declares Defoe despite eighteenth eighteenth-century fiction elaborate Eliza Haywood Emma emotional episodes epistolary novel Evelina experience fact Falkland father feeling female Fielding's first-person narrative Gothic Gothic fiction Gothic novels happenings Haywood Hermsprong heroine human Humphry Clinker husband imagined important individual insists Jones kind lack Lady letters literary Lord Elmwood Lord Orville Love in Excess lover Manley marriage marry Matilda means mind Miss Moll Flanders moral mother narrative narrator narrator's nature novel of development novelists offers Pamela pleasure plot political possibility protagonist provides psychological reader reading realism response Richardson Robinson Crusoe romance Roxana Sarah Fielding sense sensibility sentimental fiction sentimental novels servant sexual Sidney Bidulph social story structure sublime suffering suggests tells tion Tom Jones Tristram Shandy virtue women writers Yorick