The English Novel in The 18th Century. Lecture Notes. Ioana Mohor

“DUNAREA DE JOS” UNIVERSITY OF GALATI
FACULTY OF LETTERS
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
THE ENGLISH NOVEL

IN THE 18TH CENTURY
Ioana MOHOR-IVAN
I. The Novel. General Concepts

II. The English Novel in the 18th Century
III. Critical Readings
Bibliography
Discussion Questions
2015
Ioana Mohor-Ivan The English Novel in the 18th-century
I. THE NOVEL: GENERAL CONCEPTS
1. Definition
The novel is an extended fictional prose narrative, often including the

psychological development of the central characters and of their relationship
with a broader world. The modern novel took its name and inspiration from the
Italian novella, the short tale of varied character which became popular in the
late 13th century. As the main form of narrative fiction in the 20th century, the
novel is frequently classified according to genres and subgenres such as the
historical novel, detective fiction, fantasy, and science fiction.
2. Narratology
Narratology is a term used since 1969 to denote the branch of literary study
devoted to the analysis of narration, and, more specifically, of forms of narration
and varieties of narrator.
Narrative is a telling of some true or fictitious event or connected
sequence of events, recounted by a narrator to a narratee. It consists of a set of
events (the story) recounted in the process of narration (discourse); the events are
selected and arranged in a particular order (plot).
Narrator is the one who tells, or is assumed to be telling the story in a
given narrative, i.e. the imagined voice transmitting the story, while naratee is
the imagined person whom the narrator is assumed to be addressing in a given
narrative.
Elements of analysis would include: plot; setting/space; time; character;
focalisation/point of view; theme.
2.1. Plot
Plot is the pattern of events and situations in a narrative, as selected and
arranged both to emphasise relationships (usually cause and effect) between
incidents and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader (through surprise
or suspense.) A simpler definition would be: the author’s design for a novel, in
which the ‘story’ plays a part, as well as the author’s choice of language and
imagery.
The concept of plot was first developed by the Greek philosopher,
Aristotle, to describe the properties of drama. His formulation introduced
concepts such as the protagonist, or hero, whose fate is the focus of the audience’s
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attention. The hero may be in conflict with an antagonist in the form of a human
opponent or of some abstract concept such as fate; or the conflict may be in his
own mind.
As the plot progresses, it arouses expectations in the reader about the
future course of events and how characters will respond to them. A concerned
uncertainty about what is going to happen is known as suspense. If what in fact
happens violates the readers’ expectations, it is known as surprise.
A plot has unity of action if it is perceived by the reader as a complete and
ordered structure of actions, directed towards the intended effect, in which none
of the component part (incidents) is unnecessary. Aristotle claimed that it does
not constitute a unified plot to present a series of episodes which are strung
together because they happen to a single character. Many picaresque narratives,
nevertheless, such as Defoe’s Moll Flanders, have held the interest of the readers
for centuries with such an episodic plot structure.
A successful development which Aristotle did not foresee is the type of
structural unity that can be achieved with double plots, where a subplot - a second
story that is complete and interesting in its own right - is introduced to broaden
our perspective on the main plot and to enhance rather than diffuse the overall
effect. The subplot may have either the relationship of analogy to the main plot, or
of counterpoint against it.
The order of a unified plot, as Aristotle pointed out, is a continuous
sequence of beginning, middle, and end, and develops through the stages of
exposition, amplification, climax, denouement. In many plots the denouement
involves a reversal in the hero’s fortunes, which frequently depends on a
discovery, i.e. the recognition by the protagonist of something of great importance
hitherto unknown to him or to her.
Novelists in particular have at times tried to subvert or ignore the reader’s
expectation of a causally linked story with a clear beginning, middle, and end,
with no loose ends. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf wrote novels that explore the
minutiae of a character’s experience, rather than telling a tale. However, the
tradition that the novel must tell a story, whatever else it may do, survives for
the most part intact.
The English novelist E M Forster, in his Aspects of the Novel, defined it
thus: The king died and then the queen died. The king died and then the queen died of
grief at the king’s death. The first is the beginning of a series of events; the second
is the beginning of a plot.
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2.2. Setting/Space
Setting refers to the part which may be played by location or milieu or
historical time in the design of the novel. This is most commonly a reflective or
supporting role; it underlines or enhances the nature of the action or the qualities
of the characters which form the substance of the novels. Setting may be a means
of placing a character in society which allows scope for the action his nature is
capable of, or it may generate an atmosphere which has a significant function in
the plot.
It encompasses a number of different, but linked, elements:
➢ time - day or night; summer or winter; the historical period (an actual
date)
➢ place - inside or outside; country or city; specific town and country;
real or fictional
➢ social context - the significant cultural issues affecting a story’s setting
or authorship
➢ mood - the underlying feeling or atmosphere produced by a story
(eerie; dangerous; menacing; tense; threatening; relaxing; nostalgic;
happy; light-hearted etc.)
In simple terms, the relations between setting on the one hand and character and
events on the other, may be causal, or analogical: features of the setting may be
either cause and effect of how characters are and behave; or, more by way of
reinforcement and symbolic congruence, a setting may be like a character or
characters in some respects. While the examples above tend towards the broadly
personifactory, the more conventional, ‘undramatised’ settings play an important
part in promoting verisimilitude and indirect characterization.
2.3. Time
The amount of time which is allotted in the narrative to the various
elements of the story is determined with respect to the amount of time which
these elements take up in the story.
One must distinguish here between the moment in history when the story is
supposed to take place, and the time-span covered by the story, i.e. the fictional
time taken up by the action (e.g. a whole generation, a single day.)
The most influential theorist of fictional time is Gerard Genette, who
isolates three aspects of temporal manipulation or articulation in the movement
from story to narrative/text:
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➢ order (refers to the relations between the assumed sequence of events in

the story and their actual order of presentation in the text.) Any
departures in the order of presentation in the text from the order in which
events evidently occurred in the story are termed anachronies, i.e. any
chunk of text that is told at a point which is earlier or later than its natural
or logical position in the event sequence. They naturally divide into
flashbacks and flashforwards. The first (called analepses by Genette) is an
achronological movement back in time, so that a chronologically earlier
incident is related later in the text; the second (prolepses)is an
achronological movement forward in time so that a future event is related
textually before its time. The two types of anachrony entailed by them are
called correspondingly: retroversions and anticipations.
➢ duration (concerns the relations between the extent of time that events are
supposed to have actually taken up, and the amount of text devoted to
presenting those same events.) Maximum speed is said to constitute
ellipsis (no text space is spent on a piece of story duration); the opposite
situation is a descriptive pause (text without story duration.) Related terms
are summary and scene. In summary the pace is accelerated through a
textual compression of a given story period into a relatively short
statement of its main features. In scene, story and text duration are
conventionally considered identical (e.g. purely dialogue passages.)
➢ frequency (how often something happens in story compared with how
often it is narrated in text.) It may be: singulative (telling n times what
happened n times); repetitive (telling n times what happened once); iterative
(telling once what happened n times.)
2.4. Character
Character refers to a personage in a narrative (or dramatic work): it is
normally expected of a novel that it should have at least one character, and
preferable several characters shown in processes of change and social
relationship.
Characterization is the representation of persons in narrative and
dramatic works. It may include direct methods (narrative), like the attribution of
qualities in description or commentary, and indirect (or ‘dramatic’) methods
inviting the reader to infer qualities from characters’ actions, speech or
appearance. A distinction was made by Forster made between flat and two-
dimensional characters (which are simple and unchanging) and round characters
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which are complex, ‘dynamic’ (i.e. subject to development) and less predictable.
Another classification was advanced by W.J. Harvey (in Character and the Novel),
including protagonists, background figures, intermediate figures.
2.5. Point of View/Focalisation

Point of view refers to the way a story gets told - the mode or perspective
established by the author by means of which the reader is presented with the
characters, actions, setting, and events that constitute the narrative in a work of
fiction.
A broad division is established between third-person and first-person
narratives. In a third-person narrative, the narrator is someone outside the story
proper, who refers to all the characters in the story by name, or as “he”, “she”,
“they”. In a first-person narrative, the narrator speaks as “I”, and is himself a
participant in the story.
➢ First-person points of view:

o This mode naturally limits the point of view to what the first-person
narrator knows, experience, infers, or can find out by talking to other
characters. We distinguish between the narrative “I” who is a
fortuitous witness of the matters he relates, or who is a minor or
peripheral participant in the story, or who is himself or herself the
central character in the story (e.g. Mark Twain, Salinger.)
➢ Third-person points of view:
o the omniscient point of view: the convention in a work of fiction that
the narrator knows everything that needs to be known about the
agents and the events; is free to move at will in time and place, to shift
from character to character, and to report (or conceal) their speech and
actions; and also that the narrator has privileged access to the
characters’ thoughts and feelings and motives, as well as to their overt
speech and actions. Within this mode, the narrator may be intrusive
(not only reports, but freely comments on and evaluates the actions
and motives of the characters, and sometimes expresses personal
views about human life in general: e.g. Dickens and Hardy), or
unintrusive (impersonal or objective) (i.e. describes, reports, or ‘shows’
the action in dramatic scenes without introducing his own comments
or judgements, e.g. Hemingway.)
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o the limited point of view: the narrator tells the story in the third-
person, but within the confines of what is experienced, thought, felt by
a single character (or at the most by very few characters) within the
story. Henry James, who refined this mode, described such a selected
character as his ‘focus’ or ‘mirror’, or ‘centre of consciousness’. In a
number of James’s later works all the events and actions are
represented as they unfold before and filter to the reader through the
particular awareness of one of his characters. Later writers developed
this technique into STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS narration, in
which we are presented with outer observations only as they impinge
on the current of thought, memory, feelings, and associations which
constitute the observer’s awareness (e.g. Joyce, Virgina Woolf.)
Focalisation is a term used in narratology, covering broadly the same

semantic sphere as point of view (i.e. the interpretation of the text as grounded,
or anchored, coming from a particular speaker at a particular place at a particular
time.) The basic contrast is established between external/internal focalisation.
External focalisation occurs when the focalisation is from an orientation outside
the story (i.e. the orientation is not associable with that of any character within
the text.) Internal focalisation occurs inside the represented events, and involves
a character-focaliser.
2.6 Theme
Theme may be defined as the central idea which runs through the novel;
the author's purpose in writing. Key points to remember:
➢ the theme gives the story focus, unity, impact and a 'point'
➢ the theme becomes clear by looking at what happens to the major
characters. If the main character survives while others don't, it shows
us that his (or her) behaviour is being rewarded by the author.
3. Other Techniques
There are several major techniques that novelists employ to make their
novels rich in meaning and rewarding to the reader: point of view, style,
symbolism. Novelists also use a number of minor devices, such as imagery, or
irony.
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3.1. Style
Style refers to the approach the writer takes in putting together words,
phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. It can determine the pace at which the story
is told and how directly the author relates the story to the reader.
Style may be:
➢ simple: it uses common words and simple sentences, even if the
situation described is complex. The effect is to present facts to the
reader without appealing to the reader’s emotions directly.
➢ complex: it uses long, elaborate sentences that contain many ideas and
descriptions. The writer uses lyrical passages to create the desired
mood in the reader, whether it be one of joy, sadness, confusion, or any
other emotion.
➢ mid-style: it is a combination of the simple and complex styles. It can
give a neutral tone to the book, or it can provide two different effects
by contrast.
3.2 Symbolism
Many novels have two layers of meaning:
➢ the literal plot
➢ a symbolic layer in which images and objects represent abstract ideas
and feelings.
Using symbols allows authors to clarify a theme and express themselves
indirectly on delicate or controversial matters. Symbols can be anything from a
single object (a key, a necklace, a stone); a place (the beach, an airport, a house); a
repeated type of object (a dark car, a woman in sunglasses, an eagle flying
overhead); a shape (diamonds, circles, crucifixes); a gesture (wiping glasses,
lighting a pipe, a hand in a pocket); a colour; a sound; a piece of music, poetry; to
a fragrance (the smell of new-mown grass, cigar smoke).
3.3. Imagery
Imagery can be defined as the collection of descriptive details that appeal
to the senses and emotions of the reader by creating a sense of real experience.
Through imagery the writer attempts to embody in images all abstractions
and generalizations about character and meaning. It differs from symbolism in
that the purpose of imagery is not to embody meaning but to create an illusion of
reality by stimulating the reader’s senses. Nevertheless, an image may also serve
as a symbol when it has special meaning and represents another idea, either to
the reader or to the novel’s characters.
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It may be classified as follows:

➢ visual imagery: imagery of sight
➢ aural imagery: imagery of sound (e.g., the soft hiss of skis)
➢ olfactory imagery: imagery of smell (e.g., the smell of spilled beer)
➢ tactile imagery: imagery of touch (e.g., bare feet on a hot sidewalk)
➢ gustatory imagery: imagery of taste (e.g., the bland taste of starchy
bananas)
3.4. Irony
Irony refers to the reader’s recognition that what is expected from a
statement, situation, or action is different from what actually happens (i.e. the
revelation of the unexpected consequences of actions and words.) It can add
interest, humour and impact to the novel, or it can give depth to characters,
tighten the plot, help to define the characters and contribute to our
understanding of the author's theme.
Irony may assume the following forms:
➢ dramatic (acting without knowing that the effect of one’s actions is the
opposite of what one expected)
➢ situational (a discrepancy between the expected result and actual
results)
➢ verbal (saying one thing when the opposite is true)
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II. The English Novel in the 18th Century
1. Contexts
1.1. The Augustan Age

“Augustan” is an adjective borrowed from the name given to the reign of
Augustus Caesar (27 BC – 14 AD), the first Roman Emperor who “restored Rome
to peace, power and glory in the aftermath of a disastrous civil war and the
assassination of Julius Caesar which ended the Roman republic” (Widdowson
2004, 62).
With reference to English history, it becomes a descriptive term which is
applied loosely to the 18th century, when England, as well as Great Britain, a
political entity made fact with the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland, are
considered to emulate the power, prosperity and stability enjoyed by Roman
Empire under the rule of Augustus. Internally, the 18th century is characterized
by social stability, with no more conflicts between the monarch and the
Parliament, with the middle class firmly established as an important force within
it, and with the Whig party dominating the century, such as the long
administration of Sir Robert Walpole1 throughout the reigns of the first two
Hanoverian kings, George I (1714-27) and George II (1727-1760) proves. From an
economic point of view, it was a prosperous society, with trade (a new and
important feature of the economy) flourishing apace. This economic growth was
reflected in the prosperity of London itself, already established as a metropolis,
growing in importance as a centre for re-export trade with goods from the
colonies. Externally, after the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) in which
England and its allies had defeated France and Spain, two redoubtable
continental rivals, England achieved a new position of power, as an arbitrator in
European affairs, along with other war gains represented by new colonies
flowing in and new trade routes opening up (Kearney 1989, 128-37).
As far as literature and the arts are concerned, “Augustan” harks back to
the same Golden Age of Augustus Caesar, a patron of the arts, the period being
exemplified in literature by the works of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Propertius,
Tibullus and Livy. As such, it implies the height of classical artistic taste and
refinement, that Neo-Classicism both venerated and attempted to imitate. Due
to the waning of neo-classical influences during the second half of the 18th
1Sir Robert Walpole (1676 – 1745) was a Whig statesman considered to be the first holder of the office of
Prime Minister between 1721 and 1742.
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century when the transition towards writings promoting “Sensibility” and

evincing proto-Romantic attitudes becomes evident, in terms of English literary
history Augustan designates a shorter period, being usually applied up to the
mid-18th century.
Thus, Augustan literature is coterminous with the peak of English
Neoclassicism, whose characteristic attitudes involve:
➢ a deep conservatorism involving the “Ancients vs. Moderns” debate
(affirming the superiority of the classical past over the contemporary
culture);
➢ a high regard for the ‘proprieties’ of style: regularity and simplicity of
form, order and proportion, elegance and urbane wit;
➢ an emphasized sense of established or accepted values in both art and
life (“decorum”);
➢ an overvaluing of art’s pragmatic function (to educate and instruct),
with man as its most appropriate subject.
Augustan authors will continue to appropriate classical myths and forms

through which to cast a strange light on modern times, with satire remaining the
characteristic mode of the period. Yet the age will also witness an increased
prominence of prose, in response to a widening circle of middle-class readers.
One literary sideline of this trend is represented by the development of daily
newspapers, magazines and journals, with the periodical essay standing as proof
that the published word can play a powerful role in society. But the most
important outcome of this change in the readers’ social composition is
represented by the emergence of the novel as a genre in its own right, as
represented by the pioneering work of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding or Sterne.
Helped by the issuing in 1709-10 of the first English Copyright Act to protect
writers and by the loosening of legal restraints on printing that led to a boom in
publishing, a professional class of authors, writing for money in response to the
demands of the literary market, came into being, proof that a different kind of
literary culture had replaced the older, aristocratic one based on patronage
(Widdowson 2004, 60).
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1.2. The Age of Sensibility
While from a historical point of view the Age of Sensibility is included within
the larger Augustan frame, in literary history the term is used to refer to the
writing produced during the second half of the eighteenth-century, seen as a
transitional phase between the decline of neo-classical ‘Reason’ and the eruption
of Romantic ‘Imagination’ (Manning 2004, 81). Alternatively referred to as the
Age of Johnson2, the period bears witness to the gradual replacement of the
neoclassical calm detachment and mocking attitude by the belief that sentiment
can influence social development more powerfully than assumed before.
Consequently, the works of the later 18th century mark the shift between the
rational works of the Neoclassical period, and the emphasis on individual
feelings and responses of the Romantic period.
The following comparison between Neoclassicism and Romanticism
might reveal that the two cultural paradigms refer not only to two different
attitudes to literature, but also to distinct ways of seeing and experiencing life:
➢ Neoclassicism stresses the importance of reason and order. Hence
writers trust intellect and the head and control strong feelings and
flights of imagination. In contradistinction, the Romantics are attracted
by the irrational, mystical and the supernatural;
➢ Neoclassical authors look outward to society, celebrating a social order
in which everyone knows his or her place. In their turn, the Romantics
look inward, to their own soul and the life of the imagination,
celebrating the freedom of nature and of individual experience, and
being critical of society and what they consider to be its injustices;
➢ Neoclassical authors favour a formal and ordered way of writing,
characterised by the balance and symmetry of the heroic couplet (in
poetry) and by an adherence to the conventions of a special poetic
diction. The Romantics employ a different kind of writing, which
attempts to capture the ebb and flow of individual experience in forms
and language intended to be closer to everyday speech (Carter & McRae
1998, 120-2).
2 Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was the outstanding writer of the period. His works included poetry, prose,
contributions to magazines and journals, plays, literary criticism and many other works, among which A
Dictionary of the English Language (1755) had a far-reaching effect on Modern English. Although his literary
output is relatively meagre (he wrote only one novel, one play, and only a small volume of poems) his
intellectual breadth and contributions as a public man of letters were so imposing that he became the
namesake for this period in literature.
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Influential in the spread of this complex movement known as Sensibility

(or Sentimentalism) were the writers associated with the Scottish
Enlightenment3, who attempted to realize a comprehensive ‘Science of Man’ by
realigning the moral and physical selves (Kelly 1989, 12). David Hume’s A
Treatise of Human Nature (1739) examined the psychological basis of human
nature and, in stark opposition to previous rationalist theories that emphasised
the primacy of reason, concluded that desire rather than reason governed human
behaviour: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”. Moreover,
it accepted the ubiquity of the passions as motivators to action: “Morality […] is
more properly felt than judg’d of”; sympathy is “the chief source of moral
distinctions”. Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) described
sensibility as “the regulatory impulse that underpinned personal security,
protection of property, and pleasure in self-reflection and sympathetic
relationships. If the passions motivated human behaviour, propriety directed
otherwise wayward and subjective impulses into social channels and protected
the stability of societies through time”. Otherwise, sensibility was considered to
function as a kind of social cement that “holds individuals together […] through
a language of the heart that strengthens the bond of society” (Manning 2004, 82-
3).
Another powerful influence on the development of sentimentalism was
provided by Jean-Jacques Rousseau4‘s theory of natural man. Running counter
to Thomas Hobbes’s view of human nature as inherently evil5, Rousseau’s theory
maintained that man in a primitive state of nature is good, innocent and
possesses a natural disposition to compassion and pity; it is society, law and
civilization which are to be blamed for corrupting man and his natural emotions.
Stemming from this, sentimentalism would often set “untouched” nature against
(courtly) civilization.
In the last decades of the century, a new shift in sensibility occurred
toward what came to be called “the sublime”, a concept with origins in classical
Greece, which found its definitive explanation in Edmund Burke 6‘s Philosophical
3 The flourishing of philosophy and science in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the 18th century is known as the
“Scottish Enlightenment”; its leading figures included David Hume (1711-1776), known for his
philosophical empiricism and skepticism, and Adam Smith (1723-1790), the father of modern economics.
4 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a French philosopher of Genevan origin, whose writings
influenced the French Revolution, as well as the development of modern political, social and educational
sciences.
5 See the Leviathan, where Hobbes asserts that man in the “state of nature . . . has no idea of goodness he
must be naturally wicked; that he is vicious because he does not know virtue”.
6 Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher who became one of the foremost political
thinkers of 18th century England.
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Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Published
between 1757-9, Burke’s essay was to become a key text of the times, displaying
an emphasis on feelings and on imagination, in stark contrast to the neoclassicist
insistence on form and reason.
Last but not least, the Age of Sensibility that marks the transition between
Neoclassicism and Romanticism runs concurrent with the sweeping changes
brought about by the agrarian7 and industrial8 revolutions that marked the 18th
century. As the small towns and villages were replaced by a more impersonal,
mechanised society in which individuals lost their identity, the writers often
sought to correct this imbalance by giving greater value to the countryside,
nature and individual sensibility, consciousness and freedom.
Accordingly, the Age of Sensibility is a time of changing literary ideals
and forms, which will shape the course of the novel, from the sentimental to the
gothic, from the regional to the novel of domestic life.
2. The Rise of the English Novel
The birth of the “Novel”, with its associations of newness and originality, occurs
in the eighteenth century. Before that there had been forms of long and
continuous narrative prose, such as travel writings - e.g. the Travels of Sir John
Mandeville (c. 1375) and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) -,
prose romances – e.g. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), or prose satires – e.g.
Delarivier Manley’s The Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705) and The New
Atlantis (1709). But it was only in the 1720s that a recognisable “Novel” form
emerges, i.e. one which is concerned with the realistic depiction of middle class
life, values and experience, showing the development of individual (and
7 Period of development between the 17th century and the end of the 18th century, which saw an epoch-
making increase in agricultural productivity and net output, possibly in response to the increased demand
for food from a rapidly expanding population. It undermined the communal, mutually-supportive way of
village life, and replaced it with business farming. Major events included: the enclosure of open fields; the
development of improved breeds of livestock; the introduction of four-course crop rotation; the use of new
crops such as turnips as animal fodder.
8 Period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when major changes in agriculture, manufacturing,
production, and transportation had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural conditions in
Britain. The Industrial Revolution witnessed the triumph of a middle class of industrialists and businessmen
over a landed class of nobility and gentry. Major events included: the mechanisation of the textile industries;
the development of iron-making techniques; the introduction of canals, improved roads and railways; the
introduction of steam power fuelled primarily by coal; wider utilization of water wheels and powered
machinery (mainly in textile manufacturing); the creation of the factory system, which led to the rise of the
modern industrial city (large numbers of workers migrated into the cities in search of employment in the
factories).
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individuated) characters, over time. Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel connects
the emergence of the genre with the growth of the middle classes in the
eighteenth century (which creates a readership anxious to read of itself and its
values). His thesis is a materialist one, that social and historical factors generated
aesthetic responses. In particular he isolates three key areas in which we see the
influence of contexts:
➢ the growth of economic/possessive individualism, and with it the new
mercantile capitalist values of investment and capital accumulation.
➢ related to this, the rise of materialistic philosophical individualism, with
its new emphasis on the individual (rather than social groups) as the
essential social unit.
➢ the new demand for education/moral training associated with middle
class values. The middle classes existed as a readership, and required
reading material.
Other critics, particularly in writing of Robinson Crusoe, place an equal

emphasis on the influence of protestant individualism (especially Calvinism) in
directing new attitudes towards the individual.
A key concern in terms of the development of the eighteenth-century
novel is the recurring preoccupation with realism, and realistic depiction of
society. This is seen in Defoe's and Fielding's preoccupations with the word
“History” (and the need to defend themselves against accusations of lying, and
in their attempts to make their works as realistic as possible, whether by using
first person narration as in Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe, or by relying on
Aristotelian notions of “mimesis”. An alternative tactic was to use epistolary
form, most notably in the works of Richardson, (and burlesqued by Fielding in
Shamela), or to use consciously anti-romance forms, in the picaresque tradition
of Cervantes (as in Roderick Random), as a means of asserting the realism of
their writing.
Working against this was the need to shape experience into narrative
order, which would lead to the inevitable conflict between the demands of
narrative order and realistic portrayal. Part of the answer, in Defoe's case, was to
produce a loose novel, without a clear sense of narrative order and progression,
which employed the episodic technique. By the time of Fielding, he is already
self-consciously using Chapters and Books to order his narratives. This conflict
between realistic intention and aesthetic narrative order is most clearly evident in
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Sterne's anti-novel Tristram Shandy, in which the conventions of the Novel are
exploded before the novel has had a chance to become a settled form.
Another issue related to this was that of moral purpose. The eighteenth
century novel often appears torn between the demand not to offend, to teach,
and yet to be realistic. Novel writing is thus tied to the moral demands of a
middle-class readership, with is need for pleasurable instruction, evident in the
way in which these early novelists deal with sex, adultery, passion and desire.
3. Authors, Variants and Texts
3.1. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) and the Fictitious Autobiography
The writings of Daniel Defoe may be seen as fundamental to eighteenth-century

ways of thinking. They range from the early Essay on Projects (1697), written
with the moral and educational aim “to encourage polite learning, to refine the
English tongue, and advance the so-much neglected faculty of correct language,
and to purge it from all the irregular additions that ignorance and affectation
have introduced”, to the quasi-factual A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a
reconstructed documentary account of London between 1664 and 1665, from the
Swiftian pamphlet The Shortest Way With the Dissenters (1702), in which he
satirises the Anglican Torry attitude to non-conformity, to Robinson Crusoe
(1719), one of most enduring fables in Western literature as well as the strongest
claimant to the title of the first true English novel.
The story of Robinson Crusoe is based squarely on the account of a

fugitive sailor, Alexander Selkirk, who survived on an uninhabited island in the
Pacific for five years. Defoe’s imaginative reworking of Selkirk’s memoirs enjoys
therefore a pronounced degree of realism. His Crusoe is a mariner who takes to
sea despite parental warnings and, after suffering a number of misfortunes at the
hands of Barbary pirates and the elements, is shipwrecked off South America,
where, according to his journal, is able to resist for some 28 years, two months
and nineteen days. If, as a psychological study in isolation, the novel seems now
unconvincing, its strength comes from a combination of disparate echoes and
shapes: Jonah, Job, Everyman, the Prodigal Son, the colonial explorer and the
proto-industrialist. The economic aspects of Defoe’s fiction have in particular
prompted the interest of recent criticism: Crusoe’s survival and his enterprising
behaviour are seen as expressions of Defoe’s own belief in the mercantilist
mentality of the expanding British Empire. Crusoe starts his journey as a trader,
15
to make money and thus increase his material comforts. Once shipwrecked on
the island, his only thought is to remould in his distant isolation the whole
pattern of the material civilisation he has left behind. This is supplemented by a
sober, businesslike religion, with due gratitude for the God’s mercies and a belief
that God helps those who help themselves. The novel confirms for the reader the
ultimate rightness of Crusoe’s way of thinking and acting. It ends positively,
going beyond Crusoe’s rescue to show how the mariner’s investments make him
rich, while the island becomes colonised, ensuring thus the continuation of the
model of society that Crusoe established there.
Moll Flanders (1722) is another of Defoe’s attempts to pass as genuine a

work of imagination. This time it is the memoirs of a prostitute, and, as Defoe
wrote in the preface to the novel, he was keen to insist on their truthfulness:
The author is here supposed to be writing her own history, and in the very beginning of her
account she gives the reasons why she thinks fit to conceal her own name, after which there is no
occasion to say any more about that.
It is true that the original of this story is put into new words and the style of the famous
lady we here speak of is a little altered; particularly she is made to tell her own take in modester
words than she told it at first, the copy which came first to hand having been written in language
like one still in Newgate than one grown penitent and humble, as she afterwards pretends to be.
The pen employed in finishing her story , and making it what you now see it to be , has
had no little difficulty to put it into a dress fit to be seen, and to make it speak a language fit to be
read.
Thus, the first person narration unravels Moll’s dissolute life as thief, prostitute
and incestuous wife, while also containing much social comment on the gaols,
the conditions of the poor, and the suffering of emigrants, all of them subjects of
concern for the well-intentioned middle-classes. Though Moll uses her beauty
and sex as a commodity, continually trying to sell them in the highest market in
order to reach financial security, she is penitent in the end, and the narrative
allows her not only to find happiness and peace but also to be accepted back into
society.
The title hero of Colonel Jack (also 1722) is another narrator telling his
story from the vantage point of someone who has achieved wealth and
respectability, after no less dissolute beginnings as pickpocket and member of
the London underworld. Looking back on his youth, the mature colonel recounts
his first major exploit as a thief:
16
As soon as it was day, I got out of the hole we lay in, and rambled abroad into the fields, towards
Stepney, and there I mused and considered what I should do with this money, and many a time I
wished that I had not had it, for after all my ruminating upon it, and what course I should take
with it, or where I should put it, I could not hit upon any one thing, or any possible method to
secure it, and it perplexed me so, that at last, as I said just now, I sat down and cried heartily.
When my crying was over, the case was the same; I had the money still, and what to do with it I
could not tell, at last it came into my head, that I would look out for some hole in a tree, and see to
hide it there, till I should have occasion for it: big with this discovery, as I then thought it, I began
to look about me for a tree; but there were no trees in the fields about Stepney. . . and if there were
any that I began to look narrowly at, the fields were so full of people, that they would see if I went
to hide anything there, and I thought the people eyed me as it was, and that two men in particular
followed me, to see what I intended to do.
This drove me further off, and I crossed the road at Mile-End, and in the middle of the town I
went down a lane that goes away to the Blind Beggar’s at Bethnal-Green; when I came a little way
in the lane, I found a foot-path over the fields, and in those fields several trees for my turn, as I
thought; at last one tree had a little hole in it, pretty high out of my reach, and I climbed up to the
tree to get to it, and when I came there, I put my hand in, and found (as I thought) a place very fit,
so I placed my treasure there, and I was mighty well satisfied with it; but behold, putting my hand
in again to lay it more commodiously, as I thought, of a sudden it slipped away from me, and I
found the tree was hollow, and my little parcel was fallen in quite out of my reach, and how far it
might go in, I knew not; so that, in a word, my money was quite gone, irrecoverably lost, there
could be no room, so much as to hope ever to see it again for it was a vast great tree.
As young as I was, I was now sensible what a fool I was before, that I could not think of ways to
keep my money, but I must come thus far to throw it into a hole where I could not reach it; well I
thrust my hand quite up to my elbow, but no bottom was to be found, or any end of the hole or
cavity; I got a stick off of the tree and thrust it in a great way, but all was one; then I cried, nay, I
roared out, I was in such a passion, then I got down the tree again, then up again, and thrust my
hand again till I scratched my arm and made it bleed, and cried all the while most violently: then I
began to think I had not so much as half-penny of it left for a half-penny roll, and I was a hungry,
and then I cried again: then I came away in despair, crying and roaring like a little boy that had
been whipped, then I went back again to the tree, and up the tree again, and thus I did several
times.
Here Defoe offers his readers an example of a learning experience: the little boy’s
feelings are concentrated entirely upon the pleasure and pain which govern his
appetites and desires. The money has brought unpleasant feelings of guilt, but
the need for money is a consequence of a need for food. As the older man
measures the distance between his present self and the urchin he remembers, he
is also analysing the morality and psychology of theft, with the boy’s experience
of guilt, hunger and puzzlement at the unpredictability of the natural world
creating the image of a rescuable human soul. And the point of the novel is to
trace how the rescue was effected.
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3.2. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) and the Epistolary Novel
In the next generation of novelists, Samuel Richardson devised a different

formula for achieving authenticity in his fictional works, namely to allow it to be
understood that the author was simply the editor of a bundle of letters from
various hands which threw light on an interesting ‘human’ situation.
Novels in the form of letters had been popular for several decades (Aphra
Behn had published Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister as early as
1683). Richardson’s Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) raises the tone of the
novel from the level of this kind of subject-matter. In the letters that Pamela
Andrews sends to her honest and poverty-stricken parents, the novel presents a
breathless account of how the poor but virtuous teenage maidservant resists the
sexual harassment of her master until the man learns to appreciate and respect
her nature and proposes marriage in earnest. However, the story does not end
here, and the second part of the novel focuses on Pamela’s acclimatisation to the
new social position and the dignified way with which she conducts her marriage,
in accordance to Richardson’s didactic purpose – to prove that worth depends on
individual effort rather than social status.
Clarissa (1748) marks a major step forward. A longer and more elaborate
novel, it tells the story of the title heroine, the virtuous, beautiful and talented
young daughter of the wealthy Harlowes, who falls in love with a profligate
aristocrat, Robert Lovelace, rejecting an older suitor, Mr. Solmes, whom the
family have chosen for her. Lovelace abducts Clarissa, then plays with her
emotions in devious ways and finally rapes the young woman while she is under
the influence of drugs. Filled with remorse, he then wants to marry her, but
Clarissa refuses and, very slowly, dies a martyr to the combined cruelty of her
lover and her family. The novel handles the interplay of its characters’
psychology with more subtlety and complexity than the previous Pamela,
mainly due to a development of Richardson’s epistolary technique which
employs two main sets of correspondents: Clarissa and her friend, Anna Howe,
and Lovelace and his friend, Belford. This arrangement allows Richardson to
take the readers into the inner thoughts of the main characters. It also allows him
to present the action of the novel through the eyes of each of them, and while one
of them is explaining what is happening, to keep the reader in suspense about
what the other is thinking and feeling.
18
The excerpt, taken from one of Clarissa’s letters in which she describes how her
sister Bella broke the news that the family decided that the heroine must marry
Mr. Solmes, proves that the novel is essentially dramatic in form:
Obedience without reserve is required of you, Clary. My papa is justly incensed that
you should presume to dispute his will, and to make conditions with him. He knows what
is best for you; and as your own matters are gone a great way between his hated
Lovelace and you, they will believe nothing you say; except you will give the one only
instance, that will put them out of doubt of the sincerity of your promises.
What, child, are you surprised? Cannot you speak? Then, it seems, you had expected a
different issue, had you? Strange that you could! With all your acknowledgements and
confessions, so creditable to your noted prudence!
I was indeed speechless for some time: my eyes were even fixed, and ceased to flow.
But, upon the hard-hearted Bella’s proceeding with her airs of insult, indeed I was
mistaken, said I; indeed I was! For in you, Bella, I expected, I hoped for, a sister -
What! Interrupted she, with all your mannerly flings, and your despising airs, did you
expect that I was capable of telling stories for you? Did you think that when I was asked
my own opinion of the sincerity of your declarations, I could not tell them how far matters
had gone between you and your fellow [Lovelace]? When the intention is to bend that
stubborn will of yours to your duty, do you think I would deceive them? Do you think I
would encourage them to call you down, to contradict all that I should have invented in
your favour?
Well, well, Bella; I am the less obliged to you; that’s all. I was willing to think that I had
still a brother and a sister. But I find I am mistaken.
Pretty Mopsa-eyed soul, was her expression! And was it willing to think it had still a
brother and sister? And why don’t you go on, Clary? (mocking my half-weeping accent) I
thought too I had a father and mother, two uncles and an aunt: but I am mis-taken that’s all -
come, Clary, say this, and it will be in part true, because you have thrown off their
authority, and because you respect one vile wretch more than them all.
How have I deserved this at your hands, sister? But I will only say, I pity you.
And with that disdainful air, too, Clary! None of that bridled neck! None of your
scornful pity, girl! I beseech you!
This sort of behaviour is natural to you, surely, Bella! What new talents does it discover
in you! But proceed - if it be a pleasure to you, proceed, Bella. And since I must not pity
you, I will pity myself: for nobody else will.
Because you don’t, said she -
Hush, Bella, interrupting her, because I don’t deserve it - I know you were going to say so.
I will say as you say in everything; and that’s the way to please you.
Then say, Lovelace is a villain.
So I will, when I think him so.
Then you don’t think him so?
Indeed, I don’t. You did not always, Bella.
And what, Clary, mean you by that? (bristling up to me) Tell me what you mean by
that reflection?
Tell me why you call it a reflection? What did I say?
19
Thou art a provoking creature - but what say you to two or three duels of that wetch’s?
I can’t tell what to say, unless I knew the occasions.
Do you justify duelling at all?
I do not: neither can I help this duelling.
Will you go down and humble that stubborn spirit of yours to your mamma?
I said nothing.
Shall I conduct your ladyship sown? (offering to take my declined hand)
What! Not vouchsafe to answer me?
I turned from her in silence.
While the novelist is much less obviously in control of the presentation of the
scene – with no narrator to stage-manage its development – it is the dialogue
alone which carries on the story, as well as indicating emotion and attitude, and
differentiating between the two sisters. The novel itself may be read as a play of
voices, at times communing, at other times, conflicting, in which Clarissa’s tones
are often contradicted or qualified, but in the end, for most readers, thoroughly
vindicated.
At the end of the 18th century the epistolary novel had a brief but intense
European vogue. Jean-Jacques Rousseau employed in his Julie ou la nouvelle
Héloise (1761), J. W. Goethe used it in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and
Choderlos de Laclos brilliantly exploited the dramatic possibilities of the form in
his only novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782). Though the artificiality it
imposed on the writer brought about its disappearance during the next century,
20th century authors, like Iris Murdoch in An Accidental Man (1971), Saul Bellow
in Herzog (1964) and John Barth in the suggestively entitled Letters (1979) have
witnessed to its continuing appeal.
3.3. Henry Fielding (1707-54): the omniscient narrator
Henry Fielding was the other dominant figure of the mid-eighteenth century
English novel. Until the introduction of censorship with the Licensing Act of
1737, Fielding turned to the stage for a living, writing a series of successful
satirical plays like Tom Thumb (1730), Pasquin (1736) and The Historical Register
for the Year 1736 (1737), dense with contemporary allusions directed chiefly at
Horace Walpole. After the blocking of that avenue, Fielding resumed his legal
studies and also turned to political journalism (becoming, in turn, the editor of
The Champion , 1739-41, The True Patriot, 1745-46, and the burlesque Jacobite’s
Journal, 1747-48) as another outlet for his witty inventiveness.
20
An adept at literary parody and a good stylistic mimic, Fielding was

prompted into novel-writing by the furore caused by the publication of
Richardson’s Pamela in 1740. A year later he replied with a skilful pastiche
entitled Shamela (1741), which makes the innocent virtue displayed by
Richardson’s original heroine appear calculating and conniving. Fielding
followed up the same idea with his first novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), which
was also intended as a kind of parody of Richardson. Supposedly the story of
Pamela’s brother, the novel intends to make fun of chastity (male) as a heavy
moral issue. Thus it begins by ridiculing the view that innocence is possible –
would a young man-servant reject the advances of his mistress? However, under
Fielding’s hand, the novel develops quite differently: its simple tale - in which
the chaste young hero is unjustly dismissed for resisting the lures of his
employer, Lady Booby, and travels homewards, accompanied by Abraham
Adams, a poor clergyman, and Fanny, Joseph’s sweetheart - ends by asserting
the opposing view. The episodic narrative, which traces the mishaps of the trio
on their way home, constantly opposes their unaffected goodness and innocence
with the greed, arrogance, aggression and deceit that characterise the predatory
world of Georgian England.
But Joseph Andrews is not only an enquiry into the character of a virtuous
man, but also an enquiry into the form of a novel, on which Fielding theorizes in
its Preface. Appealing to Homer and Aristotle as authorities for the new genre,
Fielding considers the novel to be “a comic romance” or “a comic epic poem in
prose”, with a “more extended and comprehensive” action, which includes “a
much larger circle of incidents” and introduces “a greater variety of characters”.
This “comic epic” would take its subjects from life and would “follow Nature”,
and though the subjects would be treated in a comic way, they would not be
distorted. Moreover, events and characters should be presented not as examples
of life, but as comments on it, in order to provide the readers with models of
ethical behaviour. As such, the novelist becomes not simply a chronicler, still less
an entertainer, but a moralist who believes that through fiction (a fabricated tale
which resembles the historian’s narrative, but goes beyond it to trace permanent
features of human nature) can make recommendations about how people should
behave:
It is therefore doing him [the novelist] little honour, to imagine he endeavours to

mimic some obscure little fellow, because he happens to resemble him in one
particular feature, or perhaps in his profession; whereas his [the novelist’s]
21
appearance in the world is calculated for much more general and noble
purposes; not to expose one pitiful wretch to the small and contemptible circle of
his acquaintance; but to hold the glass to thousands in their closets, that they
may contemplate their deformity, and endeavour to reduce it, and thus by
suffering private mortification may avoid public shame.
In order to achieve this end, the novelist becomes an active shaper and
manipulator of the narrative, an omniscient and intrusive narrator who not only
controls the lives and destinies of his characters, but can intervene, explain, move
away from the detail of the story to the general truths which it was intended to
illustrate. As such, Fielding places his novel before the reader, as if inviting him
to engage in a deeply serious game, where the distance between its three
participants (the narrator, the narrative, and the reader) is often altered: now the
actions of the characters completely occupy the reader’s attention, now the
narrator acts as commentator, quietly describing what is going on, now narrator
and reader confront one another talking about the game and its implications, like
in the following fragment where the reader is challenged to visualise Lady
Booby’s surprise at Joseph’s recoil from her advances by following the narrator’s
instructions:
You have heard, reader, poets talk of the statue of Surprise; you have heard
likewise, or else you have heard very little, how Surprise made one of the sons of
Croesus speak, though he was dumb. You have seen the faces, in the eighteen-
penny gallery, when, through the trap-door, to soft or no music, Mr Bridgewater,
Mr William Mills, or some other of ghostly appearance, hath ascended, with a
face all pale with powder, and a shirt all bloody with ribbons - but from none of
these, nor from Phidias or Praxiteles, if they should return to life - no, not from
the inimitable pencil of my friend Hogarth, could you receive such an idea of
surprise as would have entered in at your eyes had they beheld the Lady Booby
when those last words issued out from the lips of Joseph. ‘Your virtue!’ said the
lady, recovering after a silence of two minutes; ‘I shall never survive it!’
In 1743 Fielding published the three volumes of his Miscellanies; part three
comprised The life of Jonathan Wild the Great, an ironical contemporary fable
that pretends to equate goodness with greatness and concerns the ‘heroic’
character of the century’s most notorious criminal and scoundrel (hanged in
1725), while pouring scorn on the innocent Heartfree.
As can be seen from the above examples, Fielding focuses more on male
characters and manners than Richardson, intending his heroes to be types
representative of their sex. The same holds true for The History of Tom Jones, A
22
Foundling (1749), where the title character is the model of the male rake reduced
to good looks, ready instincts and an inability to say no. Tom Jones is thus both a
vital and fallible hero, both generous and imprudent, enjoying his freedom in
various ways: hunting, travelling, having relationships with women. But in the
course of the journey that he is forced to undertake from the security of Mr
Allworthy’s country home to the rickety of London is also a journey from
innocence to experience, from freedom to responsibility, during which the hero
matures and learns prudence. As such Tom is eventually rewarded with a happy
marriage to Sophia Western, the woman he has ‘always’ loved and with financial
security, for his true origins as Mr Allworthy’s proper heir are promptly
discovered. The novel, structured in eighteen books, is also distinguished by the
way in which the fortunes of the hero are described by a separate narrator, who
is virtually a character in his own right, playing a great part in directing the
spicing the course of the story. These omniscient and frequently intrusive
authorial utterances invite the reader to sympathise with the hero, despite his
faults or yieldings to temptation:
Though she behaved at last with all decent reluctance, yet I rather choose to
attribute the triumph to her, since, in fact, it was her design which succeeded.
Fielding’s last novel, Amelia (1751), is a domestic novel which mirrors its
author’s own grim experience of social hardships in the metropolis. The story of
William Booth, the young army officer who has married the virtuous and
beautiful Amelia against her mother’s wishes is less exuberant than Fielding’s
other fiction, and in its depiction of social evil and legal injustice is generally
gloomy, although some minor characters like Dr Harrison, an honest clergyman,
or the brave Colonel Bath enliven the representations of human behaviour.
3.4. Tobias Smollett (1721 - 71) and the picaresque tradition
Tobias Smollett followed Fielding in writing life-stories of high-spirited young

men, like Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle (1751), The Adventures of
Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), or The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot
Greaves (1762). These novels partly belong to the tradition of picaresque fiction,
which deals with the lives of thieves and vagabonds, and which originated in
16th century Spain, the earliest example being the anonymous Lazarillo de
Tormes (1553). Alain René Le Sage adapted the tradition of the picaresque novel
in his Gil Blas (1715), a much more ambitious narrative in which the story of the
23
title hero, a respectable young man who falls among thieves, serves as a frame
for the life histories of many of the men and women he meets on his travels. This
is the formula which Smollett himself drew upon, as the novelist was careful to
acknowledge in his preface to Roderick Random:
I have attempted to represent modest merit struggling with every difficulty to

which a friendless orphan is exposed, from his own want of experience, as well
as from the selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference to mankind. To
secure a favourable prepossession, I have allowed him the advantage of birth
and education, which, in the series of his misfortunes, will, I hope, engage the
ingenious more warmly in his behalf; and though I foresee that some people will
be offended at the mean scenes in which he is involved, I persuade myself the
judicious will not only perceive the necessity of describing those situations, to
which he must of course be confined, in his low state, but also find entertainment
in viewing those parts of life, where the humours and passions are undisguised
by affectation, ceremony, or education; and the whimsical peculiarities of
disposition appear as nature has implanted them.
Nevertheless, Smollett also aimed to charge it with a human warmth that he

found lacking in his admired Gil Blas, appealing to a much wider range of
interests than Le Sage did. As such, Smollett’s expects his reader to be
sympathetic rather than merely curious, but open-minded enough to look
dispassionately on the raw scenes of low life in which his chosen form of the
picaresque novel compels him to place his hero. Though his hero’s surname
(Random) hints at the chances to which he will be subject, Smollett has taken a
decisive step away from the picaresque tradition by making him a man of good
birth, while the circumstances in which Roderick finds himself are due to the ill-
will of his grandfather as much as to chance. And like Tom Jones, Roderick will
be saved from his surroundings and an incredible series of adventures - during
which he is press-ganged in London, sails to the West Indies, is kidnapped and
taken to France by smugglers -, by his innate good breeding, and will finally be
rewarded by a happy marriage to the beautiful Narcissa. Though the plot lacks
in plausibility, the Smollett’s “realism” finds expression in the slices of
documentary or non-fictional matter which are roughly inserted, like the
following description of a storm at sea which the novelist could have
experienced first-hand while a surgeon’s mate in the navy:
24
[ . . . ] I was wakened by a most terrible din, occasioned by the play of the gun-
carriages upon the deck above, the cracking of cabins, the howling of the wind
through the shrouds, the confused noise of the ship’s crew, the pipes of the
boatswain and his mates, the trumpets of the lieutenants, and the clanking of the
chain pumps. [. . .] The sea was swelled into billows mountain high, on the top of
which our ship sometimes hung as if it was about to be precipitated to the abyss
below! Sometimes we sunk between two waves that rose on each side higher
than our top-mast head, and threatened, by dashing together, to overwhelm us
in a moment! Of all our fleet, consisting of a hundred and fifty sail, scarce twelve
appeared, and these driving under their bare poles, at the mercy of the tempest.
At length the mast of one of them gave way, and tumbled overboard with a
hideous crash! Nor was the prospect in our own ship much more agreeable; a
number of officers and sailors ran backward and forward with distraction in
their looks, halloing to one another, and undetermined what they should attend
to first. Some clung to the yards, endeavouring to unbend the sails that were split
into a thousand pieces flapping in the wind; other tried to furl those who which
were yet whole, while the masts, at every pitch, bent and quivered like twigs, as
if they would have shivered into innumerable splinters! [. . .]
Smollett’s last novel, Humphry Clinker (1771) differs from the rambling
narratives of his other fictions by adopting the old-fashioned form of the
epistolary novel. Through the interplay of several letter-writers’ outlook, the
readers find out the story of the Brambles, a family who tries to achieve health
and social harmony as they travel round Britain. It also bears witness to the cult
of sensibility, which had already entered fiction several decades earlier, and had
brought about an interest in the analysis, indulgence and display of the
emotional life, prompting a real flowering and display of humanitarian ideals
and philanthropic action. As such, the health in question is not just the health of
the principal character, Matthew Bramble, a benevolent elderly hypochondriac,
but of the nation and of all society, from the semi-literate servant Win to the
frustrated spinster aunt Tabitha, from the young Oxford student Jery to the
young and impressionable Lydia. And, significantly, the farthest point of the
journey - where the family finally reach a kind of utopia - is a “Scottish paradise”
at Loch Lomond, not far from Smollett’s own birthplace, at Dumbarton.
3.5. Laurence Sterne (1713-68) and the anti-novel
The tradition of the English novel, after less than a century of existence, started to
lend itself to subversive experimentation once Laurence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy made its entrance onto the literary scene, upsetting previous notions of
25
time, place and action and extending thus the boundaries of what fiction meant,
beyond a mere observation of human actions with moral overtones.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a highly original 8-volume

novel published between 1760 and 1767, is the first to parody the existing
conventions of the form. If plot was supposed to follow the natural order of
things, having thus a beginning, a middle and an end, Sterne was addressing his
readers even at the outset of his work pointing up the absurdities, contradictions
and impossibilities of relating time-space-reality relationship in a linear form:
Nothing which has touched me will be thought trifling in its nature, or tedious in its
telling. Therefore, my dear friend and companion, if you should think me somewhat
sparing of my narrative on my first setting out – bear with me, - and let me go on, and
tell my own story my own way: - Or, if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the
road, -r should sometimes put on a fool’s cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we
pass along, - don’t fly off, - but rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom
than appears upon my outside; and as we jog on, either laugh with me, or laugh at me, or
in short, do anything, only keep your temper.
As such, the novel, which is narrated in the first person, begins on the night of
Tristram’s conception, but does not allow its character to be born until the fourth
volume, to finally end some four years before his birth, becoming thus a parody
of the autobiographical novel, with the story of Tristram’s life never getting told.
The author deliberately hinders all movement, for his narrator’s thoughts ramble
forward, backward, sideways, describing a wide range of characters and their
peculiarities, covering every subject under the sun, but never able to carry a story
to its end.
Influenced by John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690) - which viewed mental life as a stream of ideas, linked together by chance
and flowing on beyond the control of the human being which were its hosts - the
novel attempts to imitate “what passes in a man’s own mind”, with the narrator
being led from one topic to another in an apparently random way, interrupting
the narrative with frequent digressions, i.e. episodes going off at a tangent from
the ‘main’ line of the plot. For example, the accident on Tristram’s nose (flattened
with the forceps by Dr. Slop when delivering the baby) prompts the narrator
intervene with a long digression on noses. Other digressions are provided by a
sermon delivered by Yorrick, the local clergyman named after the jester in
Hamlet, a solemn and extensive oath of excommunication in Latin, with the
translation given on the opposite page, or an unfinished tale of the King of
26
Bohemia. The same effect is achieved by Sterne’s use of graphological means,

such as a blank sheet, a page with a marbled design on it, a collection of asteriks,
lines and curves to display the difficulty of keeping to one single line of his story.
The characters themselves are further illustrations of Locke’s theory,
proving that each man lives in a world of his own, with his private obsessions, or
“hobby-horses”, as the consciousness of every individual is conditioned by his
private train of associations. Thus, if the obsession of Tristram’s father, Walter
Shandy, is the theory of names, which leads to the accidental mis-naming of the
child, corrupting the Greek name of the Egyptian god of wisdom, Trismegistus,
his uncle Toby’s “hobby horse” is the theory and practice of fortification and
siege warfare, and the retired military man who has fought on the Continental
wars spends much of his time attempting to reconstruct the battle of Namur on
the bowling green.
With no declared ideological or moral position other than to be a unique,
“civil, non-sensical and good-humoured Shandean book”, much of the appeal of
Tristram Shandy is to be sought for in its self-conscious narrator, who proves
fully aware of the artificiality of his form and the fact that he is engaging in an
intricate game with the reader, in a conversational manner that rustles on
headlong, with no regard for consistency or coherence, such as illustrated by the
following excerpt in which the narrator enters into a direct dialogue with his
imaginary audience, explaining the problems he confronts as an author:
. . . to understand how my Uncle Toby could mistake the bridge - I fear I must give you
an exact account of the road which led to it; - or to drop my metaphor, (for there is
nothing more dishonest in an historian than the use of one,) - in order to conceive the
probability of this error in my Uncle Toby aright, I must give you some account of an
adventure of Trim’s, though much against my will. I say much against my will, only
because the story, in one sense, is certainly out of its place here; for by right it should
come in, either among the anecdotes of my uncle Toby’s amours with widow Wadman,
in which Corporal Trim was no mean actor, - or else in the middle of his and my uncle
Toby’s campaigns on the bowling-green, - for it will do very well in either place; but then
if I reserve it for either of those parts of my story, - I ruin the story I’m upon; - and if I tell
it here - I anticipate matters, and ruin it there. - What would your worships have me to
do in this case? - Tell it, Mr. Shandy, by all means. - You are a fool, Tristram, if you do.
O ye POWERS! (for powers ye are, and great ones too) - which enable mortal man to
tell a story worth hearing - that kindly shew him, where he is to begin it - what he is to
put into it - and what he is to leave out - how much of it he is to cast into the shade, - and
whereabouts he is to throw his light! - Ye, who preside over this vast empire of
biographical freebooters, and see how many scrapes and plunges your subjects hourly
fall into; - will you do one thing?
27
I beg and beseech you (in case you will do nothing better for us) that wherever in any
part of your dominions it so falls out, that three several roads meet in one point, as they
have done just here - that at least you set up a guide-post in the centre of them, in mere
charity to direct an uncertain devil which of the three he is to take.
The first truly experimental English novel, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
has become the model for the 20th-century anti-novel, exemplified by authors like
Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov or John Fowles.
3.6. Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74) and the sentimental novel
During the second half of the 18th century, in reaction to the ideas of the
Enlightment placing their emphasis on reason and order, there became more and
more prevalent the belief that sentiment could influence social development
more powerfully. As such, the literary atmosphere started to witness the
replacement of the neoclassical calm detachment and mocking attitude by the
compassionate note meant to rouse the reader’s sympathy for their fellow men,
which eventually, under the influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy,
came to be associated with emotions.
Oliver Goldsmith, successful as a poet and comic dramatist, published his
Rousseauisque fable on the antithesis between the goodness and innocence of
man’s natural emotions and the corrupting power of society, law and civilisation,
The Vicar of Wakefield, in 1766. The novel is an improbable fairy-tale about Dr.
Primrose (the vicar of the title and a person who combines learning with
innocence, finding his greatest happiness by the domestic hearth with his wife
and children) who is led by the activities of the wordly and the vicious, as well as
a number of accidents, from one misfortune to another: his fortune is lost, his
elder daughter is apparently seduced and ‘ruined’ by the local squire; himself is
cheated and deceived in numerous ways until he finds himself in the local jail;
his eldest son becomes a fellow prisoner, accused of severely injuring a man in a
duel. Nevertheless, to all these the vicar responds with gentle resignation and
fortitude, and, by implausible contrivance, the novel is finally huddled to a
happy ending, where the lost fortune is restored, the ‘ruined’ daughter is
discovered alive and married to her seducer, the son is freed and able thus to
marry his first love.
In spite of the deliberate naiveties of the story and the moralising and
sentimental exhibitions of feeling, the real achievements of Goldsith’s novel are
to be found in the way in which the tale is told in the first-person point of view,
28
in the slight but effective differentiations in character between the various

members of the family, and the comprehensive picture of provincial, family life
that it provides:
[ . . .] My children, the offspring of temperance, as they were educated without softness,

so they were at once well-formed and healthy; my sons hardy and active, my daughters
beautiful and blooming. When I stood in the midst of the little circle, which promised to
be the supports of my declining age, I could not avoid repeating the famous story of
Count Abensberg, who, in Henry the Second’s progress through Germany, when other
countries came with their treasures, brought his thirty-two children, and presented them
to his sovereign, as the most valuable offering he had to bestow. In this manner, though I
had but six, I considered them as a very valuable present made to my country, and
consequently looked upon it as my debtor. Our eldest son was named George, after his
uncle, who left us ten thousand pounds. Our second child, a girl, I intended to call after
her aunt Grissel; but my wife, who had been reading romances, insisted upon her being
called Olivia. In less than another year we had another daughter, and now I was
determined that Grissel should be her name; but a rich relation taking a fancy to stand
god-mother, the girl was by her direction called Sophia: so that we had two romantic
names in the family; but I solemnly protest I had no hand in it. Moses was our next; and,
after an interval of twelve years, we had two sons more. [. . . ] a family likeness prevailed
through all, and properly speaking, they had but one character, that of being all equally
generous, credulous, simple and inoffensive
3.7. The Gothic novel
In the last decades of the century, a new shift in sensibility occurred toward what
came to be called “the sublime”, a concept from classical Greek which entered
English thought through the French of Boileau and found its definitive
explanation in Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Published between 1757-9, Burke’s essay
was to become a key text of the times, displaying an emphasis on feelings and on
imagination, in stark contrast to the neoclassicist insistence on form and reason.
Nevertheless, Burke’s idea of the sublime goes beyond natural beauty into the
realms of awe, or ‘terror’, because, for him, the sublime is ‘productive of the
strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”. Linking it thus with
terror, emotion and feeling.
The link between the sublime and terror is most clearly seen in the
“Gothic novel”, a form which concentrated on the fantastic, the macabre and the
supernatural. The term “Gothic” has medieval and architectural connotations,
29
being generally held to refer to the kind of European building characterised by

its use of pointed arches which had flourished in the Middle Ages. But in a series
of novels written from the 1760s to the 1790s, which featured haunted castles,
spectres rising from the grave and wild landscapes, the term came to be
associated with mystery, romance, ivy-covered and owl-haunted ruins, acquiring
the generic meaning of “horror fantasy”.
a) The Castle of Otranto, the novel published by Horace Walpole (1717-

97) in 1764 is the first of this kind, initiating this sub-genre in English literature. It
is a story of medieval times, set in south Italy, with castles, vaults, ghosts, statues
which come to life, sudden violent death, forest caves, and the whole
paraphernalia of horror. Passion, grief and terror are the mainstrays of the plot,
which moves between the unlikely and the totally incredible. Manfred, the actual
prince of Otranto, is in fact the offspring of a usurper who had poisoned the
rightful heir, Alonso. Haunted by the prophecy foretelling the end of his male
line and the return of the rightful heir, Manfred engineers the marriage of
Conrad, his son, to the beautiful Isabella and then attempts to enforce himself on
the maiden once his son gets mysteriously killed. But his plans are thwarted by a
peasant boy, Theodore, who helps Isabella escape and who, at the end of the
novel, is proclaimed the true price of Otranto by a suddenly enlivened statue of
Alonso, which grows enormous and overthrows the castle burring a terrified
Manfred with it.
The immediate widespread popularity of the Gothic novel was also
helped at the hands of several accomplished women writers, such as Ann
Radcliffe and Clara Reeve, who combined Gothic sensationalism with the cult of
feeling.
b) The novels of Ann Radcliffee (1764-1822) are typical in this respect.

Though they still employ standard Gothic properties, such as secret passages,
vaults, sliding panels, old manuscripts unexpectedly discovered, their emphasis
falls on romance, and the supernatural incidents, after allowing the novelist
extract maximum of suspense and excitement, are always explained in the end as
produced by natural causes. For example, in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794),
Radciffe’s most successful novel, the young heroine, Emily, is forced to follow
her tyrannical aunt, Madame Cheron, to the castle of her new husband, the cruel
Montoni. But the series of sinister and frightening occurrences which the two
face at Udolpho and which eventually lead to the aunt’s death are proven to
30
have been engineered by Montoni himself, who has, in the meantime, turned his
attentions to Emily. Nevertheless, in the nick of time the heroine manages to
escape and the resolution seals the triumph of good, with Emily’s return to her
native Gascony where she is happily reunited with the Chevalier de Valancour,
her first and faithful lover.
c) Frankenstein, the novel published by Mary Shelley (1797-1851) in 1818,

is not properly Gothic if compared to The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of
Udolpho, where the virginal female victim is subjected to increasingly
exaggerated horrors. Here the ‘horror’ element of the story is related to the
unsuccessful experiment of the hero, the young doctor Victor Frankenstein, who,
instead of creating a perfect human being, gives birth to a monster, an eight-foot
hideous creature who will become responsible for the death of his family,
fiancee, as well as his own eventual destruction. During the 20th century, mostly
due to the Hollywood film industry, the subject of Mary Shelley’s novel was
raised to the level of universal myth, while its title is liable of giving a new word
to the language. Nevertheless, many modern readings have reacted against the
cinematic image of the monster, preferring to read the tale as a psychological
exploration of creation, childbirth and responsibility, with a corresponding
emphasis on the creature as an outcast - an innocent who has had human life
thrust upon him and who is destined to roam the icy waters (a vision of 20 th-
century wastelands) in solitude.
To support this view, one may often cite the creature’s own point of view,
which is given full voice in the epistolary form of the novel, balancing with
pathos the horror which other narrative voices describe, such as is the case in the
following fragment in which the monster utters his first words to another human
being:
My heart beat quick; this was the hour and moment of trial which would decide my
hopes or realise my fears. The servants were gone to a neighbouring fair. All was silent in
and around the cottage; it was an excellent opportunity; yet, when I proceeded to execute
my plan, my limbs failed me, and I sunk to the ground. Again I rose; and, exerting all the
firmness of which I was master, removed the planks which I had placed before my hovel
to conceal my retreat. The fresh air revived me, and, with renewed determination I
approached the door of their cottage.
I knocked. ‘Who is there?’ said the old man - ‘Come in’.
31
I entered; ‘Pardon this intrusion,’ said I, ‘I am a traveller in want of a little rest; you
would greatly oblige, if you would allow me to remain a few minutes before the fire.’
3.8. Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) and the regional novel
Maria Edgeworth, or ‘the great Maria’ – as she came to be known -, was one of
the best-known literary figures of the time, writing of the Irish social scene at the
time when the Act of Union passed in 1801 had brought Ireland fully into he
United Kingdom, in both a political and legal sense.
Her fictional work established Edgeworth as a writer of small-scale,
‘provincial’ novels, where the particular detail and the humour and sense of
character enlists the sympathetic participation of the reader. At the same time,
these novels proved to become an acknowledged influence on Walter Scott, who
praised Edgeworth’s innovations in his preface to Waverley (1814) and followed
their model in his own depictions of the Scottish provincial scene.
Castle Rackrent, published in 1800, is the first of these. The novel is set in
1782, aiming to provide a vivid picture of the Irish social conditions preceding
the Union. It focuses on the history of a family of Irish landlords, whose path to
ruin is narrated by Thady Quirk, their steward, who has witnessed their excesses
and improvidence for the past three generations. Thady’s narrative starts with
the story of the lavish entertainer Sir Patrick Rackrent, who drinks himself to
death. Then it goes on to that of Sir Patrick’s eldest son, Sir Murtagh, who dies in
a rage against the enemies whom he continually sues. Sir Kit, the next Rackrent,
is a gambler who fares no better, being killed in a duel. The present landlord, Sir
Condy, eventually loses the estate by loans and litigations to Thaddy’s own son,
Jason, and the Rackrents’ line is ended when Condy himself dies trying to
emulate one of his grandfather’s drinking feats.
The novel displays a lively awareness of the Irish scene as well as that of
the moral and psychological problems arising out of an impinging new social
order, for Thaddy’s son, Jason, who educated himself and managed to become a
lawyer, is intended as a representative of a rising, predatory middle-class. In the
same order of ideas, the retainer’s self-professed loyalty to the Reckrents
becomes ambiguous, especially in view of his son’s eventual possession of the
estate.
The addition to the text of a preface, footnotes and a glossary introduces
elements of antiquarian and sociological commentary, while the use of Hiberno-
English (a term applied to those varieties of English spoken and sometimes
32
written in Ireland) in Thaddy’s narrative, reveals an interest in regional varieties

of language, such as the following fragment illustrates:
Monday Morning.
Having, out of friendship for the family, upon whose estate, praised be Heaven! I and mine have
lived rent-free, time out of mind, voluntarily undertaken to publish the Memoirs of the Rackrent
Family, I think it my duty to say a few words, in the first place, concerning myself. My real name
is Thady Quirk, though in the family I have always been known by no ther than “honest Thady” -
afterward, in the time of Sir Murtagh, deceased, I remember to hear them calling me ‘old Thady’
and now I’m come to “poor Thady”; for I wear a long great coat winter and summer, which is
very handy, as I never put my arms into the sleeves; they are as good as new, though come
Holantide next I’ve had it these seven years; it holds on by a single button round my neck, cloak
fashion. To look at me, you would hardly think “poor Thady” was the father of attorney Quirk;
he is a high gentleman and never minds what poor Thady says, and having better than fifteen
hundred a year, landed estate, looks down upon honest Thady; but I wash my hands of his
doings, and as I have lived so will I die, true and loyal to the family. The family of the Rackrents
is, I am proud to say, one of the most ancient in the kingdom. (. . .) Sir Tallyhoo only never gave
a gate upon it, it being his maxim that a car was the best gate. Poor gentleman! He lost a fine
hunter and his life, at last, by it, all in one day’s hunt. But I ought to bless that day, for the estate
came straight into the family, upon one condition, which Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin at the time took
sadly to heart, they say, but thought better of it afterwards, seeing how large a stake depended
upon it, that he should, by act of parliament, take and bear the surname and arms of Rackrent.
Now it was that the world was to see what was in Sir Patrick. On coming into the estate,
he gave the finest entertainment ever was heard of in the country; not a man could stand after
supper but Sir Patrick himself, who could sit out the best man in Ireland, let alone the three
kingdoms itself.
[...]
Sir Patrick died that night: just as the company rose to drink his health with three cheers, he fell
down in a sort of fit, and was carried off: they sat it out, and were surprised, on inquiry, in the
morning, to find that it was all over with poor Sir Patrick. Never did any gentleman live and die
more beloved in the country by rich and poor. His funeral was such a one as was never known
before or since in the country! [. . .] But who’d have thought it? Just as all was going on right,
through his own town they were passing, when the body was seized for debt - a rescue was
apprehended from the mob; but the heir who attended the funeral was against that, for the fear of
consequences, seeing that those villains who came to serve acted under the disguise of the law:
so, to be sure, the law must take its course, and little gain had the creditors for their pains. First
and foremost, they had the curses of the country: and Sir Murtagh Rackrent, the new heir, in the
next place, on account of this affront to the body, refused to pay a shilling of the debts, in which
he was countenanced by all the best gentlemen of property, and others of his acquaintance; Sir
Murtagh alleging in all companies, that he all along meant to pay his father’s debts of honour, but
the moment the law was taken of him, there was an end of honour to be sure. It was whispered
(but none but the enemies of the family believe it), that this was all a sham seizure to get quit of
the debts, which he had bound himself to pay in honour.
33
Castle Rackrent was followed by Belinda (1810), a satiric novel in which

the wicked Lady Delacour, whose tortured life has elements of gothic mystery, is
reformed by the title-character. The Absentee (1812) deals with the ill-effects of
landlord absenteeism in Ireland, while Ormond (1817) is innovative in its
exploration of the effect of reading on the title-hero. Of her later novels, Helen
(1834) presents a depressing view of the prospects for Irish society. Edgeworth’s
keen, but disillusioned love of Ireland which her work records is also
acknowledged in a letter dated the same year, 1834, in which the novelist
declared it impossible to write fiction about the post-Union Ireland: “The people
would only break the glass and curse the fool who held the mirror up to nature –
distorted nature, in a fever.”
3.9. The novel of social and domestic life
If women took an active part in producing the gothic novel, they proved even
more active in producing a different type of novel, at the other end of the scale,
namely the one of contemporary social and domestic life. Here the chief interest
lies in the delineation of manners and the detail and intimacy with which the
behaviour of characters in a specific and limited social environment is described.
a) Fanny Burney (1752-1840) is the author of a series of novels which portray

how a young woman grows up and develops as she enters and experiences the
society of her day.
The first of them and the one which established her reputation is Evelina;
or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, published in 1778.
Employing an epistolary form, the novel traces the story of the title-heroine, a
girl of humble education, brought up in rural seclusion until the age of 17 when
she is sent to see the world and also enters the world of fashion. There she suffers
a series of frustrations and humiliations until she meets the right people, in the
persons of the aristocratic Lady Howard and Lord Orville, who, in seven months
(and three volumes) tutor her education in self-knowledge, prudence and
discretion and eventually turn her into a right match for Lord Orville himself.
Her second novel, Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress, published in 1782, concerns
the fortunes of Cecilia Beverley, who is victimised by her three unscrupulous
guardians, Harrel, Briggs and the Hon. Compton Delville until she is eventually
allowed to find a modicum of happiness with her lover Mortimer Delville.
34
In both of them the tone is gently satirical, blended with vivid

observation, while society and the aspirations to be part of it are their main
concerns. Their strength lies in comedy and the comedy of domestic life,
developed around innocent heroines like Evelina and Cecilia. As a novelist,
Burney inherited the form from Richardson and Fielding, but handled it in such
a way that would prove useful to Jane Austen, herself.
b) Jane Austen (1775-1817) ranks as the greatest of these women novelists, the
one who raised the genre to a new level of art by applying the techniques of the
novel to the acute observation of the provincial society of her time.
Austen’s novels portray small groups of people in a limited, perhaps
confining environment. Her characters, who are middle-class and provincial,
have as their most urgent preoccupations courtship, while their greatest ambition
proves to be marriage. The apparently trivial incidents of their life are moulded
by the author into a poised comedy-of-manners, where a gentle irony is
deployed in order to point to the underlying moral commentary. Though one
finds no exhibitionist critical apparatus, like in Fielding, nor any pretentiously
announced didactic purpose, like in Richardson, Austen’s novels remain
arresting because she managed to apply the microscope to human motivation
and character, turning her fictions into representations of universal patterns of
behaviour, which display the vision of man as a social animal, as well as the
ironic awareness of the tensions between spontaneity and convention, or
between the claims of personal morality and those of social and economic
propriety.
Northanger Abbey, published in 1818, but completed in 1798, is probably
the first. The novel gently satirises the 1790s enthusiasm for the gothic sub-genre,
by contrasting day-to-day life with the imagined horrors of Ann Radcliffe’s
novels. These have had a considerable effect on the impressionable heroine,
Catherine Morland, who humiliates herself in the eyes of her fiancé’s father
when she misconstrues the atmosphere and events occurring at the Tilneys’
home (the rebuilt old abbey of the title) as part of a gothic novel situation:
Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all
her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland
counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine
forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and
the South of France, might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented.
Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed,
would have yielded the northern and western extremities.
35
The author’s distanced and slightly ironic observation of the heroine and of the
love-intrigues in fashionable Bath already displays the tone and point of view
which Austen was to refine in her later works, less obviously intended to ridicule
and more concerned with the acute depiction of character and interaction.
In the novels which followed, Austen continues to focus on young
heroines. Sisters are often contrasted, like in Sense and Sensibility, published in
1811, in which Elinor represents sense and self-control, while Marianne stands
for sensibility and impulsive emotions. Their closely worked out plots usually
involve the twists and turns of emotion in search for love, marriage, happiness
and social status, like in Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, where Elizabeth
Bennett and Darcy have first to discover themselves and then each other in their
loss of pride and prejudice. It is this development which allows them a happy
marriage, while the other characters, who remain quite the same throughout the
novel, settle back at the end into their accustomed modes of behaviour.
Austen’s use of point of view also becomes more sophisticated. Though
she employs the omniscient point of view, the explicit manipulation of the reader
which characterised Fielding’s narrators dissapears, and irony determines
something of the point of view shared between an invisible third person narrator
and the reader. Consider, for example, the opening of Pride and Prejudice:
It is a truth generally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune,

must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on this first
entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding
families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their
daughters.
“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that
Netherfield Park is let at last?”
The first sentence, without explicitely interpellating the reader with the address
“dear reader”, like in Fielding, manages, nevertheless, to effectively give him the
premise on which the author will work. The reader is invited to share it before
proceeding with the reading of what subsequently happens to the members of
the Bennett family once their interest in the new tenants at Netherfield is
aroused, and thus colludes with the author/narrator in the telling of the tale.
At other times, Austen uses free indirect speech or adjectives that
represent her characters’ own opinions and attitudes rather than those of the
36
author/narrator. In this case the reader is silently manipulated into a situation of

plural points of view, represented by the interplay of that of the author/narrator
and character, or an explicit and implicit one.
The following excerpt represents the beginning of Emma, the novel
published in 1816 which tells the story of a rich and clever girl, whose confidence
in her own understanding of people and her well-meaning desire to manipulate
the lives of her social inferiors as well as some of her equals will involve her in a
number of delusions:
.
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy
disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly
twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father,
and had, in consequence of her sister’s marriage, been mistress of his house from a very
early period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct
remembrance of her caresses, and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as
governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.
Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in Mr Woodhouse’s family, less as a

governess than a friend, very fond of both daughters, but particularly fond of Emma.
Between them it was more the intimacy of sisters. Even before Miss Taylor had ceased to
hold the nominal office of governess, the mildness of her temper had hardly allowed her
to impose any restraint; and the shadow of authority being now long passed away, they
had been living together as friend and friend mutually attached, and Emma doing just
what she liked; highly esteeming Miss Taylor’s judgement, but directed chiefly by her
own.
The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too
much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the
disadvantages which threatened ally to her many projects. The danger, however, was at
present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.
Sorrow came - a gentle sorrow - but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable
consciousness. - Miss Taylor married.
After subtly setting the heroine for a fall in the first sentence by means of the
series of three epithets which encapsulate the deceptiveness of Emma’s seeming
“contentment”, the narrator rapidly summarises the circumstances likely to
breed her arrogance: deprived of her mother’s guidance at an early age, she had
assumed the role of mistress of the house due to an indulgent father and a
governess who had supplied her with a mother’s affection and not discipline. In
the third paragraph, the exact nature of Emma’s relationship with Miss Taylor,
the governess, is rendered more emphatic by means of a shift of point of view
between the author/narrator and the heroine herself, though the latter is not
37
allowed to appear entirely in the light of her own point of view because the
reports of her thinking are still in the third person.
This narrative strategy, in which the narrative is carried by author and
character together, is the one which Jane Austen refined, enabling her to reveal a
character’s feelings more directly, while still providing readers with her own
(often ironic) view of character.
III. Critical Readings
1. Structuralist Narratology
As mentioned before, narratology, or the theory of narrative, is a term

used since 1969 to denote the branch of literary study devoted to the analysis of
narrative structure: “on notions of plot, of different kinds of narrators, of
narrative techniques” (Culler 2000, 83). In its turn, structuralist narratology
examines in minute detail the inner “workings” of literary texts in order to
discover the fundamental structural units or functions that govern the various
texts’ narrative operation.
The work of Gerard Genette (1980) exemplifies this critical approach. By
focusing on narrative discourse, Genette refines the distinction between “story”
and “plot” by outlining three levels of narrative:
➢ story (histoire): the succession of events being narrated; it provides the
content of the tale in the order in which events “actually happened” to
characters, an order that does not always coincide with the order in
which they are presented in the narrative;
➢ discourse/narrative (récit): the actual words on the page, the text itself
from which the reader constructs both story and narration (narrative is
produced by the narrator in the act of narration);
➢ narration: the act of telling the story to some audience, and thereby
producing the narrative. However, just as the narrator almost never
corresponds exactly to the author, the audience (narratee) almost never
corresponds exactly to the reader.
These three levels of narrative interact by means of 3 qualities which Genette
identifies as:
➢ tense: the arrangement of events with respect to time; it involves the
notions of order (i.e. the relationship between the chronology of the
story and the chronology of the narrative); duration (i.e. the
38
relationship between the length of time over which a given event

occurs in the story and the number of pages devoted to it; that which
produces the sense of narrative speed); frequency (the relationship
between the ways in which events may be repeated in the story - the
same event may occur more than one - and in the narrative - a single
event may be described more than once.)
➢ mood: the atmosphere of the narrative which is created by the distance
between narration and story9 and perspective, which refers to the point
of view of the narrative, which may not be the same as that of the
narrator.
➢ voice: the voice of the narrator; it helps determine the narrator’s
attitude to the story being told and his reliability in relation to the way
in which the story is told.
Analysing Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews
The English critic and novelist David Lodge has showed a constant
concern with the nature of and current possibilities for fiction. In The Art of
Fiction (1992), a book aiming to analyse different aspects related to the theory of
the novel, Lodge chooses a passage from Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews in
order to exemplify how fictional discourse constantly alternates between
“showing” his readers what happened and “telling” the events. In this he
touches upon Genette’s three-levelled classification of narrative and, more
precisely, he illustrates their interaction through the operations of “duration”, or
“narrative speed” and “distance” achieved by the use of descriptive detail.
The following fragment is illustrative from this point of view, showing
Fielding’s mastery of the two forms of literary discourse identified by Lodge as
“showing” and “telling”, i.e. the blending of direct speech (the “quoted speech of
the characters”) in which language mirrors exactly the event (as the event is
linguistic) and authorial summary, where the conciseness and abstraction of the
narrator’s language effaces the particularity and individuality of the characters
and their actions, while also accelerating the speed of the narrative.
9
The greatest distance is achieved when the narrator is one of the characters in the narrative, filtering the
events through his consciousness, as well as by the absence of descriptive detail which greatly diminishes
the effect of reality; consequently, the least distance requires a minimum presence of the narrator and a
maximum of information.
39
You are too much inclined to passion, child, and have set your affections so absolutely on
this young woman, that, if G - required her at your hands, I fear you would reluctantly
part with her. Now, believe me, no Christian ought so to set his heart on any person or
thing in this world, but that, whenever it shall be required or taken from him in any
manner by Divine Providence, he may be able, peaceably, quietly, and contentedly, to
resign it.” At which words, one came hastily in, and acquainted Mr Adams that his
youngest son was drowned. He stood silent a moment, and soon began to stamp about
the room and deplore his loss with the bitterest agony. Joseph, who was overwhelmed
with concern likewise, recovered himself sufficiently to endeavour to comfort the parson;
in which attempt he used many arguments that he had at several times remembered out
of his own discourse, both in private and public (for he was a great enemy to the
passions, and preached nothing more than the conquest of them by reason and grace),
but he was not at leisure now to hearken to his advice. “Child, child,” said he, “do not go
about impossibilities. Had it been any other of my children, I could have borne it with
patience; but my little prattler, the darling and comfort of my old age - the little wretch to
be snatched out of life just at his entrance into it; the sweetest, best tempered boy, who
never did a thing to offend me. It was but this morning I gave him his first lesson in Quae
Genus. This was the very book he learnt; poor child! It is of no further use to thee now.
He would have made the best scholar, and have been an ornament to the Church; such
parts and such goodness never met in one so young.” “And the handsomest lad too,”
says Mrs Adams, recovering from a swoon in Fanny’s arms. - “My poor Jacky, shall I
never see thee more?” cries the parson - “Yes, surely,” says Joseph, “and in a better place;
you will meet again, never to part more.” - I believe the parson did not hear these words,
for he paid little regard to them, but went on lamenting, whilst the tears trickled down
into his bosom. At last he cried out, “Where is my little darling?” and was sallying out,
when, to his great surprise and joy, in which I hope the reader will sympathise, he met
his son in a wet condition indeed, but alive and running towards him.
[ . . .] The person who brought the news of his misfortune had been a little too eager, as
people sometimes are, from, I believe, no very good principle, to relate ill news, and
having seen him fall into the river, instead of running to his assistance, directly ran to
acquaint his father of a fate which he had concluded to be inevitable.
In this fragment Parson Adams is lecturing Joseph about his impatience to marry
Fanny, his sweetheart, with whom he has just been reunited after a long and
hazardous separation. Adam thus subjects him to a long homily, in which he
warns Joseph against lust, and lack of trust in Providence, invoking the example
of Abraham in the Old Testament, who was ready to sacrifice his son, Isaac, if
God required. This sermon exemplifies the operation of “showing”, because the
character’s speech is quoted verbatim. But just as Adams has declared he would
always accept the sacrifices God demands of us, his principles are cruelly put to
the test when the authorial speech intervenes with: “At which words, one came
hastily in, and acquainted Mr Adams that his youngest son was drowned”.
According to Lodge, this is the baldest type of summary, as the reader is not
40
even told who that person (one) is, while “acquainted” is a rather cold and formal
word to be used in the context of the event alluded to. The lamentations of the
bereaved father together with Joseph’s attempts to comfort him are also
summarised in the following lines, but Adam’s rejection of Joseph’s council
(“Child, Child, . . . do not go about impossibilities”) is again “showed”, i.e.
quoted in full. This helps Fielding emphasise the contradiction between the
Parson’s preaching and his practice, which, for the readers, is a confirmation of a
familiar character trait for the novel constructs Parson Adams as a thoroughly
good and generous person yet always comically enmeshed in various types of
contradictions. However, the comic of the situation is undermined by its pathos
and also the naturalness of Adams’s grief. Nevertheless, this “impasse” is
resolved later, when, after a few more lines of lamentation from Mr. and Mrs.
Adams, the son is discovered alive and well. The explanation for the child’s
survival is also provided by means of authorial comment (“The person who
brought the news…”) and it is acceptable because, on the one hand, it belongs to
a series of examples of human folly and spitefulness that run through the novel,
while, on the other hand, it occurs very quickly after the event. This is another
example of Fielding’s mastery not only of the two types of discourse in question,
but also of sustaining the mood of his narrative through a judicial blending of
narrative speed and distance: had the character of the messenger been filled in
more detail, and his speech describing the incident given in direct for, then the
whole tempo of the scene would have been more “lifelike”, and its emotive effect
quite different, as the circumstances of the drowning of the little boy would have
acquired a distressing particularity that would have destroyed the comic mood
of the novel.
41
2. Post-colonial Criticism
Post-colonial theory is geared towards understanding the problems

posed by western colonization and its aftermath. Edward Said’s Orientalism
(1978), “which examined the construction of the oriental ‘other’ by European
discourses of knowledge, helped to establish the field. Since then post-colonial
theory and writing has become an attempt to intervene in the construction of
culture and knowledge, and, for intellectuals who come from post-colonial
societies, to write their way back into a history others have written” (Culler 2000,
130-1).
The analyses conducted within this theoretical framework seek to
understand the operations - from a political, social, cultural, or psychological
point of view - of colonialist ideology which, on the one hand, justified imperial
expansion while, on the other hand, forced the colonised peoples to internalise
the colonisers’ values. Very often the term ideology is replaced by that of
colonialist discourse, in order to mark it as a distinct body of utterances
developed within the context of imperialism, and used to express colonialist
thinking. This discourse was inevitably based on the dichotomy established
between the two groups of people, where the colonists embodied the values of
what was believed to be a superior civilisation, while the colonists were defined
as inferior, savage, undeveloped. As Said among others notices, the purpose of
colonialist discourse was that of producing a positive national self-image for the
colonisers by contrasting it to the colonized, who became consequently invested
with all the negative characteristics disavowed by the former. The practice of
using the colonist culture as the standard against which all who are different are
negatively contrasted is called othering, and is a powerful ideological tool in
justifying colonial expansion.
42
Analysing Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
Edward Said’s essay “Jane Austen and Empire” (1992, 291-308) focuses
on Jane Austen’s novel, Mansfield Park10 in order to demonstrate how the post-
colonial criticism of a canonised literary text often involves moving the
“margins” of the work (i.e. the minor characters and the peripheral geographical
locations) to the centre of critical attention in order to prove that the geography
of the work is not a “neutral fact” but a “politically charged one”, which relates
to both imperialist and colonialism and prefigures later novels which deal more
explicitly with these issues.
In this order of ideas, Said emphasises the fact that Antigua, Sir Bertram’s
plantation in the West Indies, and his own trip there, referred to only in passing
in the novel, are crucial to its action in many ways.
On the one hand, Sir Thomas is forced to undertake the trip to his distant
colony because things are not doing well there, and this threatens the prosperity
and tranquillity at home, implying that Antigua’s riches are in fact sustaining the
life on Mansfield Park.
But once Sir Thomas is away to “tend” his colonial estate, a series of
inevitable misdemeanours and importunings will occur, with the Crawfords
being brought on the scene to stir things up. These will become apparent in the
various flirtations and engagements between the young men and women left
without true parental authority, crystallized in the preparations for a play
suggested by the Crawfords themselves, Lovers’ Vows, in which something
dangerously close to libertinage is about to be enacted. Though Fanny refuses to
take part in it and her discomfiture at the event is polarisingly acute, it is only
with the reappearance of Sir Thomas and the reestablishment of his rule that the
preparations for the play are stopped immediately. This is how this moment is
captured in the novel:
10 The novel written by Jane Austen in 1811 and published in 1814 focuses on Fanny Price, the poor relative
of the Bertram family, who is brought to live at Mansfield Park, their country estate, to look after her aunt.
When Sir Thomas Bertram leaves for the West Indies to safeguard his interests in the plantation that he
owns there, his children fall under the influence of Mary and Henry Crawford, their neighbours, and soon
demonstrate the deficiencies in their moral upbringing. While her cousins, Maria and Edmund, take part in
self-indulgent flirtations with the Crawfords, Fanny alone remains aloof, eventually refusing Henry
Crawford’s proposal of marriage to Sir Thomas’s displeasure. The second part of the novel shows the
unhappy Fanny returning to her family house in Portsmouth, but, distressed by the noise and disorder she
finds there, longing to return to Mansfield. Meanwhile, her cousin, Maria, though married to Mr.
Rushworth, elopes with Henry Crawford, while Edmund, who has taken orders, is rejected by his sister
Mary. The end of the novel shows Edmund becoming aware of Fanny’s worth and marrying her, while the
same amount of happiness is clearly refused to the other characters.
43
It was a busy morning with him. Conversation with any of them occupied but a small
part of it. He had to reinstate himself in all the wonted concerns of his Mansfield life, to
see his steward and his bailiff - to examine and compute - and in the intervals of
business, to walk into his stables and his gardens, and nearest plantations; but active and
methodical, he had not only done all this before he resumed his seat as master of the
house at dinner, he had also set the carpenter to work in pulling down what had been so
lately put up in the billiard room, and given the scene painter his dismissal, long enough
to justify the pleasing belief of his being then at least as far off as Northampton. The
scene painter was gone, having spoilt only the floor of one room, ruined all the
coachman’s sponges, and made five of the under-servants idle and dissatisfied; and Sir
Thomas was in hopes that another day or two would suffice to wipe away every outward
memento of what had been, even to the destruction of every unbound copy of ‘Lovers’
Vows’ in the house, for he was burning all that met his eye.
According to Said, Sir Bertram’s portrayal shows him not only as a Crusoe
setting things in order, or an early Protestant eliminating all traces of frivolous
behaviour, because there is nothing that may contradict the assumption that Sir
Thomas does exactly the same things that he did, on a larger scale, in Antigua.
Whatever was wrong in his colonial estate, economic depression, slavery,
competition with France, Sir Thomas was able to fix, thereby maintain his control
over his domain. This is taken as proof to how Austen synchronizes domestic
with international authority, making it plain that the values associated with such
higher things as ordination, law and property must be firmly grounded in actual
rule over and possession of territory, because both the success and the orderly
operation of both is dependent upon the guidance of the British patriarch.
Another instance of hidden imperialist ideology is found by Said in the
episode relating the upsetting effects that Fanny’s visit to her father’s home in
Plymouth provokes:
Fanny was almost stunned. The smallness of the house, and thinness of the walls,
brought every thing so close to her, that, added to the fatigue of her journey, and all her
recent agitation, she hardly knew how to bear it. Within the room. All was tranquil
enough, for Susan having disappeared with the others, there were soon only her father
and herself remaining; and he taking out a newspaper - the customary loan of a
neighbour, applied himself to studying it, without seeming to recollect her existence. The
solitary candle was held between himself and the paper, without any reference to her
possible convenience; but she had nothing to do, and was glad to have the light screened
from her aching head, as she sat in bewildered, broken, sorrowful contemplation.
She was at home. But alas! It was not such a home, she had not such a welcome, as -
she checked herself; she was unreasonable […] A day or two might show the difference.
She only was to blame. Yet she thought it would not have been so at Mansfield. No, in
her uncle’s house there would have been a consideration of times and seasons, a
44
regulation of subject, a propriety, an attention towards every body which there was not
here.
What is obvious from this passage is that Fanny’s visit home upsets the aesthetic
and emotional balance she has become accustomed to at Mansfield Park, and she
has begun to take for granted the luxuries there as something she cannot live
without. But there is another message to be found beneath the lines, because
Austen is also discussing two other matters. The first one refers to Fanny’s newly
enlarged sense of what it means to be at home, and the fineness of detail renders
the dangers of unsociability, of lonely insularity, of diminished awareness
associated with small places, but rectified in larger and better administered ones.
The second issue that Austen touches upon is related to the first and implies that
such spaces are not available by direct descent, or adjacency: Fanny is not
directly related to the Bertrams, nor is Mansfield Park in the nearby of Plymouth.
In order to earn the right to Mansfield Park, Fanny must first live home as a kind
of indentured servant or transported commodity, work and prove her worth
there, and only afterwards becoming rewarded with the promise of future
wealth. But Fanny’s domestic movements may be seen as paralleling the larger
ones of Sir Thomas Bertram himself, who must also leave to work and prove his
worth in the colony that enlarges the space of Mansfield Park to that of an
imperial centre, earning thus the right to enjoy all its economic benefits. As Said
states, the two movements depend on each other, and are further proof that
Mansfield Park should be read as part of the structure of Britain’s expanding
imperialist venture, opening up in the process a broad expanse of domestic
imperialist culture without which the subsequent acquisition of territory would
not have been possible.
45
Select Bibliography
Primary:
Mohor-Ivan, Ioana, English Literature in the 17th and 18th Centuries: Texts,
Contexts and Critical Readings, Galati University Press, Galati, 2011.
Mohor-Ivan, Ioana, From Theory to Text: Criticism, Critics and Readings of Late
Renaissance to Romantic English Literature, Editura Evrika, Braila, 2002.
Secondary:
Abrams, M. H., A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th edition, Holt, Rhineheart,
Winston, New York, 2002.
Alexander, Michael, A History of English Literature, Houdsmills and London,
Macmillan, 2000.
Bloom, Harold (ed.), The Eighteenth-Century English Novel, Philadelphia:
Chelsea House Publishers, 2004.
Carter, Ronald and John McRae, The Penguine Guide to Literature in English.
Britain And Ireland. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd, 2007.
Carter, Ronald and John McRae, The Routledge History of Literature in English,
Routledge, London and New York, 1998.
Culler, Jonathan, Literary Theory. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000.
Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1980.
Hunter, J. Paul, Before Novels: the cultural contexts of eighteenth-century English
fiction, New York: Norton, 1990.
Kelly, Garry, English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830, London and
New York: Longman, 1989.
Keymer, Thomas and Jon Mee (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to English
Literature, 1740–1830, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Lodge, David, The Art of Fiction, Houdsmill: Penguin Books, 1992.
Manning, Susan, “Sensibility,” in The Cambridge Companion to English
Literature, 1740–1830, ed. by Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 80-99.
Merish, Lori, “Domestic Novel,” in The Encyclopedia of the Novel, ed. by Peter
Melville Logan, Blackwell Reference Online, 2011. Available at
http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g978140516
1848_chunk_g97814051618487_ss1-11
46
Milligan, Ian, The English Novel, Harlow: Longman York Press, 1984.
Ousby, Ian (ed.), The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English,
Wordsworth Editions Ltd., Hare, 1994.
Parrinder, Patrick, Nation & Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the
Present Day, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Richetti, John, The English Novel in History 1700–1780, London and New York:
Routledge, 1999.
Sanders, Andrew, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon
Press, London, 1994.
Said, Edward W., “Jane Austen and Empire,” in Theory into Practice: A Reader
in Modern Literary Criticism, edited and introduced by K.M. Newton,
London: Macmillan Publishers, 1992, pp. 291-308.
Smith, Andrew, Gothic Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2007.
Wall, Cynthia (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Restoration and the Eighteenth
Century, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005.
Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel. Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding,
London: Pimlico, 1957, 2000.
Widdowson, Peter, The Palgrave Guide to English Literature and Its Contexts,
1500–2000, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Williams, Jeffrey, Theory and the Novel: Narrative reflexivity in the British
tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Zwicker, Stephen N. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature:
1650-1740, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004.
47
Discussion questions
Section A
1. The eighteenth century is the first period in which literacy rates,
printing, and the production of paper made reading a truly popular
occupation. What effects do you think this had on the English novel?
2. In what ways might eighteenth-century novel writing be seen as
encouraging readers to apply their own judgments/reason to the world
around them?
3. How do writers of the eighteenth-century understand their role within
the nation?
4. Using any combination of texts you like, discuss the emergence of the
distinction between the country and the city in the eighteenth century
novel.
5. Using any combination of texts you like, discuss the extent to which
imperial ideologies are reflected in 18th century novels.
6. Using any combination of texts you like, discuss the extent to which
18th century novels make use of picaresque conventions.
7. To what extent can the 18th century novel be considered a “feminine”
genre?
Section B
8. Should Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver Travels be considered a novel, or not?
Argument.
9. If Crusoe is the “1st English Novel” how does it exemplify the genre or
leave your expectations frustrated?
10. How does Crusoe’s individual life correspond to England’s history as
an imperial-colonial nation?
11. Is Moll Flanders an early feminist novel?
Section C
12. How does Pamela contribute to eighteenth-century perceptions of love?
13. To what extent does Pamela offer proof that the reading culture of the
eighteenth century desired, even enjoyed, didactic works?
14. What differences can you establish between Pamela and Clarissa?
15. How are “masculinity” and “femininity” defined through Richardson’s
novels?
48
Section D
16. The American critic Wayne Booth suggested that in Fielding the
narrator becomes the most important character. Do you agree or
disagree with this?
17. Discuss the organization of Fielding’s novels in terms of the common
journey-motif in literature.
18. Compare and contrast Richardson and Fielding in terms of their
representation of human nature – how does the method differ? How
does the subject?
19. How do Fielding’s representations of gender roles differ from those of
Defoe’s and Richardson’s?
Section E
20. To what extent can Tristram Shandy be read as an anti- novel?
21. Is Tristram Shandy a sentimental novel? Argument.
22. How does The Vicar of Wakefield utilize the sentimental conventions in
order to make observations about human nature?
Section F
23. What Gothic conventions are established with Walpole’s The Castle of
Otranto?
24. Which is Ann Radcliffe’s contribution to the Gothic genre?
25. Many readers of Frankenstein react to the tension between Neoclassical
and Romantic values they find in the novel. Are there any traits that
you would associate specifically with Neoclassical ideas, and are there
features you would describe as “Romantic”?
26. Frankenstein’s creature is referred to as a “monster” throughout. What
constitutes “monstrosity” in this text? Are there any other “monsters”
in the novel?
27. Does Mary Shelley’s novel speak to you as a modern reader? If so, in
what way?
28. How important are the “frames” (frame tales containing stories that in
turn contain inset stories) to our understanding of Shelley’s narrative?
29. What characteristics of Gothic literature are exemplified by the
surveyed texts?
Section G
49
30. Why is Castle Rackrent considered to represent the first regional novel in
English literature?
31. Is Thaddy Quirk a reliable or unreliable narrator? Argument. Can
Evelina be considered a bildungsroman?
32. What does Burney suggest is the nature of a woman's role in society?
33. Can Evelina be read as a buildungsroman?
Section H
34. Why is Austen’s fiction labelled as “novels of manners”?
35. Is Austen a neoclassical or a romantic writer? Argument.
36. In what ways does it make sense to think of Emma as a novel in which
the achievements or problems of eighteenth-century England are
reflected?
37. Why do you suppose Jane Austen once said that Emma is “a heroine
whom no one but myself will much like?”
50

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“DUNAREA DE JOS” UNIVERSITY OF GALATI

THE ENGLISH NOVEL

I. The Novel. General Concepts

I. THE NOVEL: GENERAL CONCEPTS

The novel is an extended fictional prose narrative, often including the

➢ order (refers to the relations between the assumed sequence of events in

2.5. Point of View/Focalisation

➢ First-person points of view:

Focalisation is a term used in narratology, covering broadly the same

It may be classified as follows:

II. The English Novel in the 18th Century

1.1. The Augustan Age

century when the transition towards writings promoting “Sensibility” and

Augustan authors will continue to appropriate classical myths and forms

1.2. The Age of Sensibility

Influential in the spread of this complex movement known as Sensibility

thinkers of 18th century England.

2. The Rise of the English Novel

Other critics, particularly in writing of Robinson Crusoe, place an equal

3. Authors, Variants and Texts

3.1. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) and the Fictitious Autobiography

The writings of Daniel Defoe may be seen as fundamental to eighteenth-century

The story of Robinson Crusoe is based squarely on the account of a

Moll Flanders (1722) is another of Defoe’s attempts to pass as genuine a

3.2. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) and the Epistolary Novel

In the next generation of novelists, Samuel Richardson devised a different

3.3. Henry Fielding (1707-54): the omniscient narrator

An adept at literary parody and a good stylistic mimic, Fielding was

It is therefore doing him [the novelist] little honour, to imagine he endeavours to

3.4. Tobias Smollett (1721 - 71) and the picaresque tradition

Tobias Smollett followed Fielding in writing life-stories of high-spirited young

I have attempted to represent modest merit struggling with every difficulty to

Nevertheless, Smollett also aimed to charge it with a human warmth that he

3.5. Laurence Sterne (1713-68) and the anti-novel

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a highly original 8-volume

Bohemia. The same effect is achieved by Sterne’s use of graphological means,

3.6. Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74) and the sentimental novel

in the slight but effective differentiations in character between the various

[ . . .] My children, the offspring of temperance, as they were educated without softness,

3.7. The Gothic novel

being generally held to refer to the kind of European building characterised by

a) The Castle of Otranto, the novel published by Horace Walpole (1717-

b) The novels of Ann Radcliffee (1764-1822) are typical in this respect.

c) Frankenstein, the novel published by Mary Shelley (1797-1851) in 1818,

I knocked. ‘Who is there?’ said the old man - ‘Come in’.

3.8. Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) and the regional novel

written in Ireland) in Thaddy’s narrative, reveals an interest in regional varieties

Castle Rackrent was followed by Belinda (1810), a satiric novel in which

3.9. The novel of social and domestic life

a) Fanny Burney (1752-1840) is the author of a series of novels which portray

In both of them the tone is gently satirical, blended with vivid

It is a truth generally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune,

author/narrator. In this case the reader is silently manipulated into a situation of

Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in Mr Woodhouse’s family, less as a

III. Critical Readings

As mentioned before, narratology, or the theory of narrative, is a term

relationship between the length of time over which a given event

Analysing Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews

Post-colonial theory is geared towards understanding the problems

Analysing Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

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