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
Results 1-5 of 43
Page 3
... depends on plotting that is too neat to correspond to the course of actual lives . In this chapter I propose , among other things , to initiate investigation of aspects of the early novel that the expectation of realism may obscure and ...
... depends on plotting that is too neat to correspond to the course of actual lives . In this chapter I propose , among other things , to initiate investigation of aspects of the early novel that the expectation of realism may obscure and ...
Page 5
... depends on staying close to the novels themselves in order both to delineate their individuality and to suggest connections among them. For purposes of this inquiry, I treat male and female novelists as mem- bers of a single species ...
... depends on staying close to the novels themselves in order both to delineate their individuality and to suggest connections among them. For purposes of this inquiry, I treat male and female novelists as mem- bers of a single species ...
Page 15
... and character depends heavily on narrative arrangement . Readers can respond to Bunyan's text on many levels . They may react to the ingenuity with which points of Protestant doctrine are THE EXCITEMENT OF BEGINNINGS 15.
... and character depends heavily on narrative arrangement . Readers can respond to Bunyan's text on many levels . They may react to the ingenuity with which points of Protestant doctrine are THE EXCITEMENT OF BEGINNINGS 15.
Page 17
... depends on point of view, that what the narrator sees derives not only from where she is but from who she is. Responding to the imaginative needs of its readers, it also hints moral and social reflections. It foretells eighteenth ...
... depends on point of view, that what the narrator sees derives not only from where she is but from who she is. Responding to the imaginative needs of its readers, it also hints moral and social reflections. It foretells eighteenth ...
Page 24
... depends on the idea of multiplicity — and, more impor- tant, on the idea of reading. Only by procrustean stretching and lopping or by draconian exclusion can one fit the variety of eighteenth-century fiction under a single rubric. To ...
... depends on the idea of multiplicity — and, more impor- tant, on the idea of reading. Only by procrustean stretching and lopping or by draconian exclusion can one fit the variety of eighteenth-century fiction under a single rubric. 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