Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Cultures of Quotation from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen by Kate Rumbold

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-191
Author(s):  
Kristine Johanson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Samuel Richardson

Fiction

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 68-112
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Marriage Plot

This chapter explains that unfelt affects are among the most subtly potent ones in eighteenth-century fiction, and they often decisively delineate character, advance plot, and confer a distinctive texture on narrative. The capacity of characters not to feel and not to notice feelings vitally supports the expressions of high emotion and intense desire long seen as among the novel's reasons for existence. In their privative sense, words like insensible and imperceptible sometimes serve as a plot device. Yet novelists also gesture to the insensible to evoke deeply meaningful affect, not merely as an alternative to the high-flown feelings evident in such fiction but also as a way of quietly enhancing their profundity. Moreover, these gestures help novelists navigate the perilous tensions and congruities between virtue and desire that are definitive of heroines' predicament in the marriage plot. The chapter then studies the insensible in the works of Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen.

The History of Missed Opportunities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Galperin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Levels

This study is about the emergence of the everyday as both a concept and a material event and about the practices of retrospection in which it came to awareness in the romantic period in “histories” of the missed, the unappreciated, the overlooked. Prior to this moment everyday life was both unchanging and paradoxically unpredictable. By the late eighteenth century, however, as life became more predictable and change on a technological and political scale more rapid, the present came into unprecedented focus, yielding a world answerable to neither precedent nor futurity. This alternative world soon appears in literature of the period: in the double takes by which the poet William Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what subjective or “poetic” experience typically overlooks; in Jane Austen, whose practice of revision returns her to a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, by previous documentation, as something different. It is observable in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which marriage and domesticity are consigned not only in the wake of his separation from Lady Byron but during their earlier epistolary courtship, where the conjugal present came to consciousness (and prestige) as foredoomed but an opportunity nonetheless. The everyday world that history focalizes in the romantic period and the conceptual void it exposes in so doing remains a recovery on multiple levels: the present is both “a retrospect of what might have been” (Austen) and a “sense,” as Wordsworth put it, “of something ever more about to be.”

Jane Austen’s Questioning of Gender and Genres

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Laure MASSEI-CHAMAYOU
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Conduct Books ◽  
Northanger Abbey ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
Opposite View

If Jane Austen admits in her correspondence that she was eventually pleased with Thomas Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), the Anglican theologian nonetheless endorsed the prejudices shared by most eighteenth-century moralists towards novels. Now, in Northanger Abbey, a novel filled with literary allusions, Jane Austen’s narrator bravely takes the opposite view by launching into a bold defence of the genre. Besides resorting to a biting irony to scrutinize her society’s axioms, rules and power relations, her novels notably question Manichean representations of masculine and feminine roles. Jane Austen’s choice to distance herself from the strictly gendered models inherited from conduct books, sentimental, or gothic novels, further combines with her questioning of generic conventions. This article thus aims at exploring how Jane Austen engaged with these representations while articulating her subtle didacticism. Her aim was not merely to raise the respectability of the novel genre, but also to provide a possible answer to the crisis of values that was threatening the very foundations of the political and social order.

Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew O. Winckles
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
Hannah More ◽  
Discourse Practices ◽  
Elizabeth Hamilton ◽  
Discourse Patterns ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women’S Writing

Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution argues that Methodism in the eighteenth century was a media event that uniquely combined and utilized different types of media to reach a vast and diverse audience. Specifically, it traces specific cases of how evangelical and Methodist discourse practices interacted with major cultural and literary events during the long eighteenth-century, from the rise of the novel to the Revolution controversy of the 1790’s to the shifting ground for women writers leading up to the Reform era in the 1830’s. The book maps the religious discourse patterns of Methodism onto works by authors like Samuel Richardson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Tighe, and Felicia Hemans. This not only provides a better sense of the religious nuances of these authors’ better-known works, but also provides a fuller consideration of the wide variety of genres women were writing in during the period, many of which continue to be read as ‘non-literary’. The scope of the book leads the reader from the establishment of evangelical forms of discourse in the 1730’s to the natural ends of these discourse structures during the era of reform, all the while pointing to ways in which women—Methodist and otherwise—modified these discourse patterns as acts of resistance or subversion.

Prosaic Suffering

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-171
Author(s):  
Alex Eric Hernandez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Denis Diderot ◽  
The Moment

This chapter examines the uses and meanings of prose in tragedy during the eighteenth century. It offers a close, comparative reading of Aaron Hill’s The Fatal Extravagance (1721) and Edward Moore’s The Gamester (1753), and places the developing conventions of bourgeois tragedy in conversation with the insights of Samuel Richardson, Denis Diderot, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and the actors called upon to embody its emotion. In doing so, this chapter argues that prosaic suffering performed its grief under an illusion of immediacy, in ways that were absorptive rather than theatrical, and provocatively disenchanted in their implications. Hence, bourgeois drama’s “natural picture” adapted the novel’s “writing to the moment” and embodied emotional practices characterized by quotidian concerns and an ambivalence about middle-rank life.

The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Book Production ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Insight Into

Although the emergence of the English novel is generally regarded as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, this is the first book to be published professing to cover the ‘eighteenth-century English novel’ in its entirety. This Handbook surveys the development of the English novel during the ‘long’ eighteenth century—in other words, from the later seventeenth century right through to the first three decades of the nineteenth century when, with the publication of the novels of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, ‘the novel’ finally gained critical acceptance and assumed the position of cultural hegemony it enjoyed for over a century. By situating the novels of the period which are still read today against the background of the hundreds published between 1660 and 1830, this Handbook covers not only those ‘masters and mistresses’ of early prose fiction—such as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney, Scott, and Austen—who are still acknowledged to be seminal figures in the emergence and development of the English novel, but also the significant number of recently rediscovered novelists who were popular in their own day. At the same time, its comprehensive coverage of cultural contexts not considered by any existing study, but which are central to the emergence of the novel—such as the book trade and the mechanics of book production, copyright and censorship, the growth of the reading public, the economics of culture both in London and in the provinces, and the reprinting of popular fiction after 1774—offers unique insight into the making of the English novel.

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