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 13
... different context . The tradition of religious allegory , of which John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress remains the most familiar ex- emplar , made room for the narration of commonplace events assigned large meanings . Bunyan's allegory ...
... different context . The tradition of religious allegory , of which John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress remains the most familiar ex- emplar , made room for the narration of commonplace events assigned large meanings . Bunyan's allegory ...
Page 20
... different: it moved inexorably from multiplicity toward unity. By the 1790s, Eliza- beth Inchbald could still publish, in A Simple Story, a novel with a double plot — but not without making manifest efforts to unify its two schemes of ...
... different: it moved inexorably from multiplicity toward unity. By the 1790s, Eliza- beth Inchbald could still publish, in A Simple Story, a novel with a double plot — but not without making manifest efforts to unify its two schemes of ...
Page 21
... different ways of looking at the literary work but disparate notions of what reality means. If, for instance, one believes that the unconscious mind contains a chaos of contradictory impulses and perceptions, it becomes possible to ...
... different ways of looking at the literary work but disparate notions of what reality means. If, for instance, one believes that the unconscious mind contains a chaos of contradictory impulses and perceptions, it becomes possible to ...
Page 26
... different ends, consequently makes of it quite a different thing. In the novel of adventure, individual episodes constitute complete mini-narratives, with climax and resolution. The novel of senti- ment, making feeling its object ...
... different ends, consequently makes of it quite a different thing. In the novel of adventure, individual episodes constitute complete mini-narratives, with climax and resolution. The novel of senti- ment, making feeling its object ...
Page 32
... different purposes. The anonymous Adventures of Lindamira, a Lady of Quality (1702) (“Revised and Corrected by Mr. Tho. Brown”) exemplifies a more common adventure mode of the century's opening years. Manley adopted a fanciful quasi ...
... different purposes. The anonymous Adventures of Lindamira, a Lady of Quality (1702) (“Revised and Corrected by Mr. Tho. Brown”) exemplifies a more common adventure mode of the century's opening years. Manley adopted a fanciful quasi ...
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