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 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. |
From inside the book
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Page 3
... sense to customary standards of realism as offering a plausible illusion of actuality . But many relied heavily on techniques of exaggeration often associated with satire , though crucial also to sentimentalism ; and almost all ...
... sense to customary standards of realism as offering a plausible illusion of actuality . But many relied heavily on techniques of exaggeration often associated with satire , though crucial also to sentimentalism ; and almost all ...
Page 4
... sense of itself in a period of dramatic change . Examining the century's novels primarily as literature , rather than as social documents or exemplars of a single movement , I shall call attention to the narrative dexterity exemplified ...
... sense of itself in a period of dramatic change . Examining the century's novels primarily as literature , rather than as social documents or exemplars of a single movement , I shall call attention to the narrative dexterity exemplified ...
Page 9
... sense, they did not even control their children: in case of divorce or sepa- ration, children of both sexes belonged to their fathers. With many social forces impinging on their opportunities, a few women yet made not only money but ...
... sense, they did not even control their children: in case of divorce or sepa- ration, children of both sexes belonged to their fathers. With many social forces impinging on their opportunities, a few women yet made not only money but ...
Page 13
... sense of literary activity as transnational . The figures who populate eighteenth - century novels need money , which they may find , lose , inherit , earn , steal , beg , borrow , or be given . Their counterparts in romance require ...
... sense of literary activity as transnational . The figures who populate eighteenth - century novels need money , which they may find , lose , inherit , earn , steal , beg , borrow , or be given . Their counterparts in romance require ...
Page 16
... sense of honor far exceeds that of most Englishmen he encounters ; the narrative consistently emphasizes this fact . In all these respects - physical prowess and beauty , impeccable behavior , chivalric honor — he epitomizes the romance ...
... sense of honor far exceeds that of most Englishmen he encounters ; the narrative consistently emphasizes this fact . In all these respects - physical prowess and beauty , impeccable behavior , chivalric honor — he epitomizes the romance ...
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 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