THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

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• THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

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Historical Context

• After the turbulent years of the 16th and 17th
  century, 18th century came as a relief. After the
  Stuarts, a succession of Protestant kings rules
  Britain. However, a monarch would never again
  influence arts and culture in manner of Elizabeth
  I. The power in the state shifts towards
  Pariliament, and the social standards and taste
  are dictated by the middle class.
• This literary period was influenced by the
  neoclassical trends from the continent, and the
  translations of classic Greek and Roman poets.
• The 18th century is often called The Age of
  Reason. Literature was dealing with reason, not
  feelings, and a comfortable town life was
  preferred to the wild nature.
• A shift from poetry and drama towards the novel.
• According to the taste of the constantly rising
  middle class.

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The Augustan Age (1700-1745)

• In prose, the earlier part of the period was
  overshadowed by the development of the English
  essay.
• Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's The Spectator
  established the form of the British periodical
  essay -the detached observer of human life who
  can meditate upon the world without advocating
  any specific changes in it.
• The English novel, first emerging in the
  Restoration, developed into a major literary
  form.
• The novel would benefit indirectly from a tragedy
  of the stage, and in mid-century many more
  authors would begin to write novels.

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• In this period many new prose forms and genres
  began
• Dr. Samuel Johnson published the first English
  dictionary in 1755.
• His friend James Boswell recorded his life in
  Life of Johnson, one of the first biographies in
  English.
• Edward Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the
  Roman Empire, the first great historical work in
  English.

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• Oratorical prose (speeches)
• Epistolary prose (letters)
• Mid-18th century flourishing of the novel
• Samuel Richardson Pamela, Clarissa
• Henry Fielding Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
• Tobias Smollet Roderick Random
• Laurence Sterne Tristram Shandy
• Oliver Goldsmith The Vicar of Wakefield

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JONATHAN SWIFT (1667 1745)

• The greatest prose writer of English classicism
  a great humorist and a savage satirist.
• Capable of pure fun, but there is a core of
  bitterness in him which revealed itself finally
  as a mad hatred of mankind.
• He still strove to do good for his fellow-men,
  especially the poor of Dublin where he was Dean
  of St. Patricks.
• His "savage indignation" resulted in devastating
  attacks on his age in A Tale of a Tub (1704),
  Gulliver's Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal
  (1729).
• A Tale of a Tub a parable of three forms of
  Christianity in England. A story of three
  brothers Jack (Calvin), Martin (Luther
  Protestantism) and Peter (st Catholic Church)
  and what they do with their inheritance
  (Christian religion).

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• Gullivers Travels 4 books
• A Voyage to Lilliput a shrunken human race,
  "not six inches high" (15 cm), and its concerns
  so important to Lilliput become shrunken
  accordingly. It makes fun of mankind, especially
  England and English politics. Lilliput and
  Blefuscu are permanently at war because of
  differences over the correct way to eat a boiled
  egg from the rounded end according to the
  Blefuscudians, or from the sharp end according to
  the Lilliputians. The supporters of the differing
  views were called "Big-endians" and
  "Little-endians." The story is a parody of the
  European nations, particularly England and
  France, who were in Swift's view constantly at
  war over 'trivial' matters satirizes the
  dispute between Catholics and Protestants.

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• A Voyage to Brobdingnag land of the giants (72
  feet 22 meters). Tiny Gulliver sees human
  deformities magnified to a feverous pitch horror
  of the human body.
• A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib,
  Luggnagg and Japan makes fun of useless, absurd
  and impractical inventions.
• A Voyage to the Country of Houyhnhnms horses
  with rational souls and highest moral principles
  are contrasted with the filthy, depraved Yahoos,
  who are really human beings. Swifts hatred of
  man reaches its climax the powerful and horrible
  moment when Gulliver reaches home and cannot bear
  the touch of his wife her smell is the smell of
  a Yahoo and makes him vomit.

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DANIEL DEFOE (1660-1731)

• Middle-class tastes were reflected in the growth
  of periodicals and newspapers, the best of which
  were the Tatler and the Spectator produced by
  Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele . The
  novels of Daniel Defoe, the first modern novels
  in English, owe much to the techniques of
  journalism. They also illustrate the virtues of
  merchant adventure vital to the rising middle
  class. Indeed, the novel was to become the
  literary form most responsive to middle-class
  needs and interests.
• A journalist. He had things to say and wanted to
  say them clearly.
• Journal of the Plague Year (Dnevnik iz godine
  kuge).

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• Most remembered for his novels he wrote later in
  life. The intention of these works is that the
  reader should regard them as true, not as
  fictitious.
• Moll Flanders (1722) we seem to be reading the
  real life-story of a bad woman, written in the
  style appropriate to her. A fictionalized
  autobiography of a prostitute and a thief. Defoe
  demonstrates his knowledge of English social and
  economic life.
• Robinson Crusoe (1720) the story of a castaway
  sailor based on the account of Alexander Selkirk.
  Realistic approach Told in the first person as
  if it were Robinsons personal story amassing
  facts, details. A stranded sailor who manages to
  reproduce in nature the material and moral
  pattern of the civilization he left behind. A
  success story a man who is triumphant owing to
  his hard work, diligence, physical and mental
  abilities not owing to his origins (noble
  family).

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The Age of Sensibility (The Age of Johnson)
1745-1784

• SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784). Often referred to
  simply as Dr Johnson, is one of England's best
  known literary figures a poet, essayist,
  biographer, lexicographer and a critic of English
  Literature. Between 1745 and 1755, Johnson wrote
  perhaps his best-known work, A Dictionary of the
  English Language. The rise in literacy and the
  declining cost of printing demanded clearer
  standards in spelling, meaning and grammar. Well
  known for his wit and aphorisms preserved for
  us in the Life of Johnson (1791) by his friend
  James Boswell.

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SAMUEL RICHARDSON (1689-1761)

• A professional printer who took to novel-writing
  when he was fifty. He liked to help women with
  the composition to their love letters and was
  asked by a publisher to write a volume of model
  letters for use on various occasions. He was
  inspired to write a novel in the form of a series
  of letters (epistolary novel), a novel which
  should implant a moral lesson in the mind of his
  readers (he thought of these reader primarily as
  women). This novel was Pamela, or Virtue
  Rewarded, which describes the assaults made on
  the honour of a virtuous housemaid by an
  unscrupulous young man. Pamela resists clinging
  tightly to her code of honour and her reward is,
  ultimately, marriage to her would-be seducer.
  Criticism virtue commodity to be sold to the
  highest bidder.

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HENRY FIELDING (1707-1754)

• Parodies of Pamela Shamela, Joseph Andrews
• Joseph dismissed from service because he will not
  let his employer, Lady Booby, make love to him.
  He takes the road to the village where his
  sweetheart lives, meets Parson Adams strange
  adventures on the road, meeting rouges, vagabonds
  and tricksters of all kinds. Picaresque novel
  (Spanish picaro rouge)
• Fieldings masterpiece Tom Jones picaresque
  elements theme of journey and mock-epic,
  largeness of the conception, but not Homeric
  characters. Charming, ordinary and likable
  characters, Tom Jones and Sophia Western. A rich
  variety of characters, a sweeping view of
  society, shrewd moral observations. Boisterous
  humour, good sense, vivid characterization.

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Other significant novelists

• Laurence Sterne - a unique perspective on the
  impossibility of biography (the model for most
  novels up to that point) with Tristram Shandy,
• Tobias Smollett improved on the picaresque novel
  with Roderick Random
• Each of the above mentioned novels represents a
  formal and thematic divergence from the others.
• Each novelist was in dialogue and competition
  with the others
• The novel established itself as a diverse and
  open-formed genre
• Most of the 18th century novels are regarded as
  classics today.

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End of 18th century

• During the Age of Sensibility, literature
  reflected the worldview of the Age of
  Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) a rational and
  scientific approach to religious, social,
  political, and economic issues that promoted a
  secular view of the world and a general sense of
  progress.
• This extreme rationalism and skepticism naturally
  led to a reaction, which would evolve to the
  Romantic movement. Some literary works showed
  increased emphasis on instinct and feeling,
  rather than judgment and restraint. A growing
  sympathy for the Middle Ages during the Age of
  Sensibility sparked an interest in medieval
  ballads and folk literature. Ann Radcliffe's
  novels would embody all of this.

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Gothic Novel

• a genre of literature that combines elements of
  both horror and romance.
• generally believed to have been invented by the
  English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764
  novel The Castle of Otranto. The effect of Gothic
  fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an
  extension of Romantic literary pleasures that
  were relatively new at the time of Walpole's
  novel.
• Gothic Revival architecture rejects the clarity
  and reason in the same way and focuses on intense
  feelings and atmosphere.
• he ruins of gothic buildings gave rise to
  multiple linked emotions by representing the
  inevitable decay and collapse of human creations

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• Features of Gothic novelmystery, terror, the
  supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic
  architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay,
  doubles, madness, secrets, and hereditary curses.
• Stock characters villains, tyrants, bandits,
  maniacs, Byronic heroes, persecuted maidens,
  femmes fatales, demons, ghosts, etc.

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• Anne Ratcliffe was the pioneer of the Gothic
  Novel. The majority of her work tends to involve
  innocent, but heroic young women who find
  themselves in gloomy, mysterious castles ruled by
  even more mysterious barons with dark pasts.
• The Romance of the Forest
• Most famous novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho -
  considered the ultimate Gothic Novel of the late
  18th century.