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 49
Page 8
... Despite the large number of women who wrote fiction, relatively few retained even name recognition into the twentieth century. Until recently, perhaps only Frances Burney would have represented women novelists before Jane Austen in the ...
... Despite the large number of women who wrote fiction, relatively few retained even name recognition into the twentieth century. Until recently, perhaps only Frances Burney would have represented women novelists before Jane Austen in the ...
Page 12
... Despite their varied ap- proaches, most of the novelists here to be considered shared new ideas about what makes a story worth attending to, ideas implicit in their turn toward “ordinary people” as characters. If the composers and ...
... Despite their varied ap- proaches, most of the novelists here to be considered shared new ideas about what makes a story worth attending to, ideas implicit in their turn toward “ordinary people” as characters. If the composers and ...
Page 23
... despite retrospective impositions . In a situation that both allowed aspiring novelists to make use of conventions developed in many literary forms and authorized them to invent new conventions , one can speculate that writers might ...
... despite retrospective impositions . In a situation that both allowed aspiring novelists to make use of conventions developed in many literary forms and authorized them to invent new conventions , one can speculate that writers might ...
Page 31
... despite her own passion. He then secretly establishes her as his mistress in a country house and urges her to invite the countess to keep her company. Subsequently he falls in love with the countess and seduces her. Charlot flees and ...
... despite her own passion. He then secretly establishes her as his mistress in a country house and urges her to invite the countess to keep her company. Subsequently he falls in love with the countess and seduces her. Charlot flees and ...
Page 34
... despite allusions to truth. On the contrary: the satisfaction of reading about Charlot's career, for instance, or Lindamira's has every- thing to do with implausibility, heightened by the speed of the narration. These stories do not ...
... despite allusions to truth. On the contrary: the satisfaction of reading about Charlot's career, for instance, or Lindamira's has every- thing to do with implausibility, heightened by the speed of the narration. These stories do not ...
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