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 54
Page 3
... society from which they emanate . The facts of the world we inhabit measure reality for most of us , and eighteenth - century fiction frequently draws on facts of experience . Yet to call it realistic for these reasons requires ignoring ...
... society from which they emanate . The facts of the world we inhabit measure reality for most of us , and eighteenth - century fiction frequently draws on facts of experience . Yet to call it realistic for these reasons requires ignoring ...
Page 6
... society at large . In earlier times writers of verse and prose had profited from a system of patronage : wealthy men and women , usually aristocrats , bestowed gifts and sinecures on authors whom they favored , thus provid- ing them ...
... society at large . In earlier times writers of verse and prose had profited from a system of patronage : wealthy men and women , usually aristocrats , bestowed gifts and sinecures on authors whom they favored , thus provid- ing them ...
Page 12
... society that generated it. My present interest in literary effects rather than social causes calls attention, however, to other problems. What did the new novel look like? It presented a startling variety of faces. The novel included ...
... society that generated it. My present interest in literary effects rather than social causes calls attention, however, to other problems. What did the new novel look like? It presented a startling variety of faces. The novel included ...
Page 30
... society. What news she does not know already, she avidly gathers, painting by means of detailed and elaborated examples a picture of a corrupt world, controlled by lust, cupidity, and the desire for power. In enforcing this view of society ...
... society. What news she does not know already, she avidly gathers, painting by means of detailed and elaborated examples a picture of a corrupt world, controlled by lust, cupidity, and the desire for power. In enforcing this view of society ...
Page 31
... society in decay but inventing or discovering ever new instances, the reader experiences vicariously the rich possibility that life can offer. Much of that possibility is dangerous. Near the end of volume 2, Intel- ligence remarks, “The ...
... society in decay but inventing or discovering ever new instances, the reader experiences vicariously the rich possibility that life can offer. Much of that possibility is dangerous. Near the end of volume 2, Intel- ligence remarks, “The ...
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