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 2
... figures in the new novel is not to say that eighteenth-century novels were necessarily “realistic.” On the contrary: the story I want to tell focuses especially on deviations from realism. It is primarily because novels depict ...
... figures in the new novel is not to say that eighteenth-century novels were necessarily “realistic.” On the contrary: the story I want to tell focuses especially on deviations from realism. It is primarily because novels depict ...
Page 7
... figures about the number of readers and writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . Historians agree , though , that the capacity to read and write ex- panded across social levels , creating a new audience , so that by the end ...
... figures about the number of readers and writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . Historians agree , though , that the capacity to read and write ex- panded across social levels , creating a new audience , so that by the end ...
Page 11
... figures novelistically in ways quite remote from mar- riage . Whether an eighteenth - century fiction deals with prostitution or politics , confinement or adventure , untrammeled lawbreaking or tram- meled domesticity - and the period's ...
... figures novelistically in ways quite remote from mar- riage . Whether an eighteenth - century fiction deals with prostitution or politics , confinement or adventure , untrammeled lawbreaking or tram- meled domesticity - and the period's ...
Page 13
... 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 neither money nor , apparently , food . The novel's ...
... 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 neither money nor , apparently , food . The novel's ...
Page 14
... figures for familiar experience . When Christian , at the beginning of the “ strait and narrow way ” he must follow to salvation , comes to the house of Inter- preter , its master shows him into a parlor full of dust . A man comes in to ...
... figures for familiar experience . When Christian , at the beginning of the “ strait and narrow way ” he must follow to salvation , comes to the house of Inter- preter , its master shows him into a parlor full of dust . A man comes in to ...
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