As the Enlightenment period brought about new ways of thinking and was concerned with reason; ideas of the fantastic and religious were rid of. With the turn of the century and James II returning to the throne, theatre returned to flourish, women writers emerged, religion and morals returned to the forefront (Todd 36, Richetti). Although the pendulum swung away from the Enlightenment, the craving for material based in reality continued to be of importance, but the line between fact and fiction is normally indecipherable (Richetti). The people of the Restoration period craved gossip and “factual” history they could sink their teeth into just as we now have TV, newspapers, etc. to give us our dose of fact and fiction combined (Todd 32, Richetti 6). John Richetti in the Cambridge Companion says,
“Indeed, the novel, the narrative institution, that emerges eventually out of this rich confusion is an outgrowth of the norms of that intellectual development we call the Enlightenment, since with its strict establishment of a categorical and absolute difference between the fictional and the factual, the new novel is a mode of regulation and realignment of those perhaps naturally interpenetrating spheres” (Richetti 2) with the coming and going of the Enlightenment we retain the need for substance marked with truth, but there is still a need for a bit of the fantastic with larger than life characters dealing with good and evil and a provocative story line that can at least be stretched to be possibly true. With the possibility for finding out scandalous things about the people within the stories; there had to be qualifiers for how learning this “true” history also can be educational and for the moral wellbeing of the people reading because ...
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...nsequence and discouragement of “naughty” actions.
Just like all tabloids claim their gossip to be true today and we gobble this information up, the 18th century novel had much of the same effect as readers were told this information was true. Along with being taught a “moral” lesson, readers could enjoy a story that felt private and scandalous to get their dose of drama within a realistic setting. Pamela and Fantomina both are examples of the emergence of blending fact and fiction to create a more dynamic, interesting, story that is grounded in reality as well as staying within the constraints and needs of the time which continues to flourish today.
Works Cited:
The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996
Todd, Janet. The Sign of Angelica. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
In what follows, my research paper will rely on an article by Kathy Prendergast entitled “Introduction to The Gothic Tradition”. The significance of this article resides in helping to recapitulate the various features of the Gothic tradition. In this article the authoress argues that in order to overturn the Enlightenment and realistic literary mores, many of the eighteenth century novelists had recourse to traditional Romantic conventions in their works of fiction, like the Arthurian legendary tales (Prendergast).
Melton, James V. H. The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print.
*Abrams, M.H., ed., et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Sixth Edition. Vol.I. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993.
In the late eighteenth century arose in literature a period of social, political and religious confusion, the Romantic Movement, a movement that emphasized the emotional and the personal in reaction to classical values of order and objectivity. English poets like William Blake or Percy Bysshe Shelley seen themselves with the capacity of not only write about usual life, but also of man’s ultimate fate in an uncertain world. Furthermore, they all declared their belief in the natural goodness of man and his future. Mary Shelley is a good example, since she questioned the redemption through the union of the human consciousness with the supernatural. Even though this movement was well known, none of the British writers in fact acknowledged belonging to it; “.”1 But the main theme of assignment is the narrative voice in this Romantic works. The narrator is the person chosen by the author to tell the story to the readers. Traditionally, the person who narrated the tale was the author. But this was changing; the concept of unreliable narrator was starting to get used to provide the story with an atmosphere of suspense.
Copeland, Edward. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print
In her article “The Rise of Fictionality”, literary critic Catherine Gallagher sources an etymological modification of the term ‘fiction’ with the rise of the novel in eighteenth-century England, where it emerged as “a supposition known to be at variance with fact, but conventionally accepted” (347). This occurred at a time when an extensive homology between the ubiquitous use of speculation in modern society and that of belief that operates in the novel arose. The former required “the kind of cognitive provisionality one practices in reading fiction” (347). Through its frequent application and encounter, the “readers developed the ability to tell [fiction] apart from both fact and (this is the key) deception” (338). Its “earlier meaning of “deceit, dissimulation, pretence” became obsolete” (338). This paper will identify the effect of the synchronously burgeoning field of psychology, and its use of speculations and hypotheses in studying the mind, on this modification of fiction’s meaning, and its consequent influence on the formal and the thematic structure of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. While it does not assume a unidirectional, causal alliance between the two, for the scope of this paper more attention will be paid on how the novel was configured in its scientific environment. This will be
Fiction (from the Latin fictio, “a shaping, a counterfeiting”) is a name for stories not entirely factual, but at least partially shaped, made up, imagined. It is true that in some fiction, such as historical novel, a writer draws upon factual information in presenting scenes, events, and characters. But the factual information in a historical novel, unlike that in a history book, is of secondary importance.
This conception of history as a set of unrepeatable, closed events that could be transparently recorded has come under duress in the 20th century. The alternative approach to literary historiography, as pursued by the formalists, bent the stick in the absolute other direction by attempting to explain the evolution of literature not through historical context but by the consideration of the literary system as a relatively autonomous sphere governed by its own set of rules. The formalist experiment attempted to dehistoricize, while simultaneously, attempting to restore coherence and order to the literary system. The concept of defamiliarization attempted to explain literary evolution as a constant series of renewals based on the rejection of past forms that are displaced by new forms. Such a method, while having its own merits in certain contexts, doesn’t explain the full spectrum of questions such as the strong persistence of certain genres across time and the co-existence of diverse genres in the same historical moment. It further disturbs our notions of periodization usually based on historical events such as the beginning or the end of a monarch’s
Levenson, Michael. "The Value of Facts in the Heart of Darkness." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40 (1985):351-80.
As the inspector begins to investigate the murders of the boys he collects history books that he believes will give him insight into Richard III and his horrible crime. The first history book he comes upon is a historical reader which bears “the same relation to history as Stories from the Bible bears to Holy Writ.” This book explains the tale of the princes in the tower using short paragraphs and full page illustrations which teaches an important moral, but adds no insight to the real story of Richard III. The second text he uses to investigate the crime is a proper school history book. The first realization he comes to while reading this book is that all school history books seem to separate history into easy to digest sections associated by the different reigns that never intersect or overlap. The second realization is that Richard III must have had a towering personality to have made himself “one of the best-known rulers” in two thousand years o...
Pope, Alexander. "An Essay on Man." in Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Eds. Geoffrey Tillotson, Paul Fussell, Jr. and Marshall Waingrow. New York: Harcourt, 1969. 635-51.
Tucker, Martin- ed. Moulton’s Library of Literary Criticism… Vol. I- The Beginnings to the Seventeenth Century New York, Frederick Publishing Co. 1966:
English literature is continuously developing into a more complex, and interwoven network of shared, or argued ideas. Proof of this goes back into all of the varieties of literature that we have discovered from times past, as well as anything new that is written today. One example of these works of art that has been studied intensely over the years includes the story of The Duchess of Malfi written by John Webster somewhere between 1580 and 1625. This is a story of tragic loss, desperate love, and vicious vengeance which all comes together to form one of the greatest tragedies of all time.
The eighteenth century novel was one that changed the way novels were written in many different ways. In reading Ian Watt's book, "The Rise of The Novel," quite a few things were brought to my attention concerning the eighteenth century novel; not only in how it was written and what went into it, but how readers perceived it. This essay will look into Ian Watt's perceptions on the eighteenth century novel and how it changed from previous literature.
Abrams, M. & Greenblatt, S. 2000. The Norton Anthology of English Literature 7th ed. Vol. 2. London: Norton.