ENGL 5134 18th Century Lit: Novel and Romance

 

Mr. Radcliffe

2:00 PM - 3:15 PM TR  Shanks Hall 352

 

This seminar surveys the modern origins of the world's most popular fictional form:  the novel.  The word means "new."  Eighteenth-century novels not only treated "novel" topics and situations, they cultivated formal innovation in what can seem retrospectively like a "progress" towards modern fiction.  All the important techniques of modern novel-writing have eighteenth-century origins.  But eighteenth-century writers did not set out to create fiction as we know it.  They had their own agenda and their own intellectual problems, perhaps chief among them the need to invent and criticize the very concepts of "progress" since applied to the novel itself.  The difference between their situation and ours should not be underestimated: they did not have three hundred years of novels behind them--in many respects the form really was "new."  On the other hand, they did not apply the word "novel" to prose fiction generally.  Their term was "romance," which referred to a very old kind of fiction indeed.

 

When modern readers apply modern, novelistic notions of "progress" to the early history of the novel the result can be cognitive dissonance.  On this view, the form is a "foundling" of no known origins which, undergoing a series of adventures and misadventures, acquires the experience necessary to evolve and triumph as the dominant literary genre.  One frequently encounters such foundlings and adventurers in early fiction.  But just as frequently one encounters a different kind of story, which if  extended to the history of novels would go something like this:  by a cruel stroke of fortune, a literary genre of illustrious ancestry is deprived of its innate dignity, though remaining true to its kind, it is at last be restored to its rightful inheritance.  The first narrative is a novelistic kind of story, and the second a romance kind of story.

 

Neither of these stories captures the whole truth about eighteenth century fiction, which evolved in torturous and complicated ways.  But they do underscore the importance of terminology:  there are large consequences that follow from treating our subject as the progress of the novel versus the history of romance.  Eighteenth-century writers were quite cognizant of this kind of distinction, and they typically told stories that combine elements of novel and elements of romance in heady and often unstable mixtures.  The novel (or the romance) was, after all, intended to mirror reality, which is nothing if not complex.  Cognitive dissonance was the order of the day then even as it is now.  Resolving dissonance was the business of comic fiction; examining its inexorability was the business of tragic fiction.

 

Our seminar will be organized around distinctions between novel and romance, histories of progress versus histories of loss and recovery.  We will consider how the modal distinction between novel and romance played out over a broad range of fictional forms: heroic romance, criminal biography, society novels, and gothic fictions.  The works we will read are all quite canonical, being foundational texts in the history (or progress) of prose fiction.  If they have been intellectual posers to literary critics, generations of common readers have found them to be good and memorable stories.  Fantastic as it often is, early fiction beats to the pulse of life as we know it.  Evaluation will be based on:  Midterm and class assignments: 25%; Final: 25%, 15 pp. research paper, 50%.

 

READINGS:

Aphra Behn:   Oroonoko & Other Writings.  Oxford University Press.

Daniel Defoe:   Roxana. Oxford University Press.

Samuel Richardson:   Pamela.  Oxford University Press.

Henry Fielding:   Joseph Andrews & Shamela.  Oxford University Press.

Horace Walpole:   The Castle of Otranto.  Oxford University Press.

Henry Mackenzie:   The Man of Feeling.   Oxford University Press.

Tobias Smollett:   The Expedition of Humphry Clinker.  Oxford University Press.

Maria Edgeworth:   Castle Rackrent. Oxford University Press.

Walter Scott:   Rob Roy.  Oxford University Press.