Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Introduction

To the modern reader the novel is such a familiar form that it's hard to conceive of its not having always been around. But though prose fiction has existed in some form since the ancient Romans, the genre we call the "novel" per se is of much more recent vintage. Dating it with precision is impossible because defining it with precision is impossible, but the first English novel is usually considered the work of Daniel Defoe writing in the early 1700s. Once Defoe inaugurates the form, the novel goes through a century of dramatic if uneven progress, increasing in psychological depth, formal inventiveness, and intellectual and artistic sophistication.

We begin the course with Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, a work of reckless vitality that brought a new level of gritty realism to popular fiction; knights and ladies were suddenly replaced by hookers and thieves. We then proceed to mid-century with Samuel Richardson's Pamela, which furthered the trend toward greater psychological realism and introduced the formal innovation of the "epistolary novel" or the novel in letters. Also around mid-century appeared Humphrey Clinker by Tobias Smollett, one of the most intelligent and tough-minded comic novelists of the century.

The closing decade of the 1700s witnessed violent revolution in France and a corresponding period of political reaction in England. A small set of English novelists, however, fought back against entrenched injustice, exploring the possibilities of the novel for social and political protest. The most important of these novels is probably Caleb Williams by William Godwin, which explores the corruptions in English society in a work of great intensity, suspense, and final tragedy. Robert Bage in Hermsprong presents the same corruptions in a key of knockabout farce, combining the protest of Godwin with the comic intelligence of Smollett.

The final novel, Jane Austen's Persuasion, blends a sort of autumnal sadness with sparkling satire. In rounding out the achievement of the eighteenth century novel, Austen's work in part answers the attacks of the Jacobins while opening the way toward the fiction of the Romantic and later Victorian periods.

Besides the close study of the literary works and their cultural and intellectual backgrounds, students will carry out an independent research project on some issue arising from their reading.

Course Goals

This course will teach students the following:

to recognize the distinctive traits of the novel and of some of its subgenres as these have evolved over time;

to consider literary history in the light of cultural, intellectual, and material developments in society;

to recognize and respond to differences in literary styles and narrative structures;

to understand a range of rhetorical goals for the novel and the means by which these can be achieved;

to combine their own insights with those of others, including both their fellow classmates and professional scholars, in order to deepen and enrich their understanding further, and to express their ideas clearly and effectively in spoken and written discourse..