The Eighteenth Century

Novel: An Introduction

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
WBSU
COURSE 202 204
Philosophical Paradigms
 Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes
 Meditations: Descartes
 An Essay on Human Understanding, John
Locke
 Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith: the notion
of sensibility and sentiment
 The changing notion of selfhood, the
validation of quotidian experience
Michael McKeonn
 The progress of philosophy through
 Romance idealism
 Naïve empiricism (empirical non fictions)
 Extreme Skepticism (Self Consciousness and
satire, the novel questions philosophy)
 Thus from romance to the news and then
towards satire
History: important features
 1688: Glorious Revolution; freedom of
expression
 1695: lapsing of the Licensing Act
 The rise of the Whigs.1714 onwards the Whig
ministry is in place. Rise of Robert Walpole as
Prime minister
Economy
 The rise of the middling classes
 The overall movement to the cities
 The turnpikes: availability of the novels
 The colonial projects, travel writing: the
ceaseless theme of movement and social
mobility
 The rise of the unheroic hero
Print culture
 The rise of the vibrant counter culture; Grub street
 The rise of circulating libraries: availability of novels
 The Pamela media event: when print entered public discourse: was
Pamela the 18th century superman?
 Licensing acts and the censors: rise of Fielding
 Huge readership: same novel read across a wide spectrum thus new
heroes, new moral and a whole new system of representation.
 A few figures illustrate the explosion of print in the eighteenth
century. In the 1620’s, 6,000 titles appeared in England, the
figure rose to 21,000 by 1710, and by 1790, 56,000 titles had
appeared. In 1725, there were 75 printers in London, by 1785
there were 124. In 1668, there were 198 men employed in this
trade, by 1818 it had jumped to 3365.
The Public Debates
 Habermas: concept of the public sphere:the novel as integral to
this public sphere
 The issues: crimminal system and the penal code, the woman
question, the issue of bastards, the issue of midwives, the
penitentiary, police system.
 Habermas defines the “public sphere” as
 the sphere of private people come together as a public; they
soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against
the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate
over the general rules governing relations in the basically
privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange
and social labour. The medium of this political confrontation was
peculiar and without historical precedent, people’s public use of
reason.
Novel: An Urban Genre
 J. Paul Hunter: not all novels begin in London but
they are all in a hurry to get there.
 It was the mercantile capital of Europe, a seat of
learning and liberty, the heart of print culture. The
attitudes towards it varied from admiration and faithful
recording of particulars (half a page of Moll Flanders
tabulates the list of London Street Names), to a sharp
critique of the filth, hypocrisy and debasement of
London life
 The novel too shared this fascination. Since it also
explored the life of the under-privileged and
marginalised, the London criminal underworld recurs
as a motif in numerous texts from Moll Flanders to
Amelia.
The Women of Grub Street
 Haywood, Behn and Manley: the rise of
amatory fiction
 The issue of domesticating the woman and
restricting her to the private sphere:
patriarchy in the novels
 The response to the allegations of indecency,
immorality and passion, the case of
Richardson’s replacement by virtue.
Women and the Novel
 Women were its largest consumers.
 Quite obviously it had to satisfy their desire for
representation of love and desire.
 Patriarchy saw the threat of circulating passions;
therefore the rhetoric of virtue.
 Lawrence Stone: the changing notion of family and
marriage, the father daughter relationship – theme in
Clarissa, the notion of the companionate marriage:
the novels articulated this theme.
 Overall however the novels were agents of patriarchy
to a large extent reducing the woman to the private
rather than the public sphere, submission rather than
subversiveness.
Ian Watt
 The Triple Rise Thesis
 Rise of the Middle Class
 Rise of Literacy
 Rise of the Novel
 Problem: Is this a superstructure on the pinnacle of which lies
the novel; is it the superlative form to which all other genres lead
up to?
 Watt identifies the basic features of the novel in the repudiation
of traditional plots and figurative eloquence, the particularization
of character and background, of naming, temporality, causation
and physical environment. Thus Watt unites the philosophical
realism of Descartes and Locke with the socio-economic –
individualism, capitalism, secularised Protestantism and the rise
of the middle class. This leads him to conclude that “the lowest
common denominator of the novel genre as a whole [is] its
formal realism”.
Watt: Possessive Individualism
 Max Weber: Protestantism and the emphasis
on individualism
 Tawney: new economic formation and the
concept of the new self
 Mcpherson:The notion of the new individual
in a new economy and the rise of possessive
individualism
 Paul Hunter: Closets and Gin drinking and
Novel reading
Lennard Davis: News/Novels
Discourse
 A matrix of writings dealing with empirical journalistic writings;
competing genres which vie for market space
 This unmediated matrix is the news/novels discourse to which the novel
belongs
 No genre is privileged
 Problem: is the novel then drawn wholly from the empirical realistic
domain: Where is the romance? The pornographic?
 I would like to assign the title news/novels’ discourse ... since it is
clearly one in which these two terms interact in crucial ways ... The
word ‘news’ was applied freely to writings which described either true or
fictional events. The characteristics of this news/novels discourse are
an insistence on recentness as well as factuality and a decreasing of
the perpetual distance between reader and text. In addition, the
news/novels discourse has historically answered the needs of the lower
classes to be informed about public events ... and is a kind of
undifferentiated matrix out of which journalism and history will be
distinguished from novels.
William Warner: Novel as a result of
new reading practises
 Reading changed ... from reading aloud in
groups to reading alone and in silence, from
reading the Bible or conduct books as a way
of consolidating dominant cultural authority,
to reading novels as a way to link kindred
spirits; from reading what is good for you, to
reading what you like ... thus the rise of the
novel was part of a project directed not at
instituting a new type of literature, but also as
a reform of reading practices.
The Penitentiary: John Bender
 The project of the novel like the movement
from the open prison to the organised
penitentiary
 Similar movement in the novel from a
heterogeneity of form to an organised notion
of structure; challenged by Sterne
 Similar moral emphasis, from passion and
desire to virtue and control
Terry Castle: The carnivalesque
 The novel as a subversive genre that
destabilized and questioned societal
assumptions
 The bastard as hero, the case of Tom Jones
 The lingering effects of Romance questioning
notions of realism
The anti novel discourse
 The contemporary hostility towards the novel can be traced in an anonymous
pamphlet:
Tis NOVEL that most beguiles the female heart
Miss reads – she melts – she sighs –
Love steals upon her –
And then – alas poor girl! – good night, poor Honour.

Vicesimus Knox voiced similar anxieties of a moral chaos:

There is another evil arising from a too early attention to Novels. They fix
attention so deeply, and afford so lively a pleasure, that the mind, once
accustomed to them, cannot submit to the painful task of serious study.
Authentic history becomes insipid. The reserved graces of the chaste matron
Truth pass unobserved amidst the gaudy and painted decorations of fiction. The
boy who can procure a variety of books like Gil Blas, and the Devil upon Two
Sticks, will no longer think his Livy, his Sallust, his Homer, or his Virgil pleasing.
He will not study old Lilly, while he can read Pamela and Tom Jones, and a
thousand inferior and more dangerous novels.67
 For guardians like Mrs. Malaprop, the circulating library was thus akin to an
“ever-green tree of diabolical knowledge”.
Conclusion
 Novel as a product of change and flux
 New readership and class formation
 Tending towards the realistic
 Engagement with society and the public sphere
 Self conscious about form
 Yokes desire, passion and virtue within a text
 Subversive questions about the enlightenment
 Dialogic in its essential qualities