Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English FictionIn 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 ą 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. |
From inside the book
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Page 6
... lack of social status accorded to most writers bore some relation to this fact. The old patronage system, slowly and at first partially, gave way to more direct methods of selling literature. “Subscription” provided one popular mode ...
... lack of social status accorded to most writers bore some relation to this fact. The old patronage system, slowly and at first partially, gave way to more direct methods of selling literature. “Subscription” provided one popular mode ...
Page 7
... lack dependable figures about the number of readers and writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians agree, though, that the capacity to read and write expanded across social levels, creating a new audience, so that ...
... lack dependable figures about the number of readers and writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians agree, though, that the capacity to read and write expanded across social levels, creating a new audience, so that ...
Page 15
... lack of predictability in the story's ordering. We expect the happy ending (as I said before, the conclusion is implicit from the beginning), but we don't know how Christian will get to the end of his journey. The e¤ective ...
... lack of predictability in the story's ordering. We expect the happy ending (as I said before, the conclusion is implicit from the beginning), but we don't know how Christian will get to the end of his journey. The e¤ective ...
Page 33
... lack Manley's political purpose adapt a less emphatic version of the fictional structure she employs. To group Manley's fictions with those of Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe, as this chapter does, under the rubric of ...
... lack Manley's political purpose adapt a less emphatic version of the fictional structure she employs. To group Manley's fictions with those of Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe, as this chapter does, under the rubric of ...
Page 36
... lack of explicit motive appears almost to constitute the story's point. The reader can interpret as she will. The same mixture of detailed physical specificity with lack of explanation marks many of the interpolated stories ...
... lack of explicit motive appears almost to constitute the story's point. The reader can interpret as she will. The same mixture of detailed physical specificity with lack of explanation marks many of the interpolated stories ...
Contents
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 |
Other editions - View all
Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction Patricia Meyer Spacks Limited preview - 2008 |
Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-century English Fiction Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks No preview available - 2006 |
Common terms and phrases
action actual adventure allows appears attention awareness becomes beginning behavior believes Caleb Williams calls century chapter characters claims concern consciousness continues conventions course death demonstrates depends desire despite detail di¤erent e¤ect early eighteenth eighteenth-century emotional exists experience fact father feeling female fiction fictional Fielding figure finds first follow Gothic happenings human husband imagined important individual insists instance interest kind lack Lady less letters lives Lord manners marriage marry matter means mind Miss moral mother narrative narrator nature never novel novelists o¤ers Pamela pleasure plot political possibilities principles provides reader reading reflect relation remains response reveals romance sense sensibility sentimental servant sexual Simple situation social society story structure su¤ering sublime suggests tells things tion Tristram understanding virtue woman women writers writing young