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Novel horizons analyses how narrative prose fiction developed during the English Restoration. It argues that following the reopening of the theatres in 1660, generic changes within dramatic texts occasioned an intense debate within prologues and introductions. This discussion about the poetics of a genre was echoed in the paratextual material of prose fictions: in trans¬lators’ introductions, authorial prefaces, and other accompanying material. In the absence of an official poetics that defined prose fiction, paratexts ful¬filled this function and informed readers about the changing features of the budding genre. This study traces the piecemeal development of these generic boundaries and describes the generic competence of readers through the detailed analysis of paratexts and actual narrative prose fictions. Rather than trying to canonize individual Restoration novels, Novel horizons covers the surviving textual material widely, focusing on narrative prose fictions published between 1660 and 1710. Drawing on genre theories by Jacques Derrida and M.M. Bakhtin, the study follows an approach to genre that sees a textual corpus as an archive that projects into the future, thereby enabling later readers and writers to experiment with forms and themes. In addition to tracing the paratextual poetics of Restoration fiction, a substantial section of this book covers the state of the art of fiction-writing during the period. It discusses aspects such as character development, narrative point of view, and questions of fictionality and realism in order to describe how these features were first used in popular fiction at the time.
Restoration prose works and the eighteenth-century novel. The author of an impressive ten-volume tome, confidently called The History of the English Novel (1924–39), Ernest Baker ranges widely across the European languages, much like Dunlop before him. In his discussion of the early modern novel, he follows the popularity of John Barclay’s Argenis through its multiple translations and duly acknowledges the impact of both Behn and Defoe.6 All such early efforts in the history of the novel must not obliterate the fact that reading and writing about this genre remained a
fiction, however, the canon seems to be firmly in place; and prose fiction remains excluded from discussions of seventeenth-century literature. Indeed, as William Warner notes with reference to specialist studies on the early history of the novel: ‘Even the most theoretically sophisticated and politically progressive of these recent literary histories return to familiar canonical texts to stage the formation of “the” English novel.’9 It is not for a general lack of insight into the period and its cultural development, though, that Restoration prose fiction fares so
locates the Gothic novel’s cultural work in establishing kinship relations, provides a way of understanding the monstrous relationships between these female characters. Armstrong reads the history of the novel in terms of the relationship between the modern individual and society. In fact, she equates the two: ‘The history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are
There was a debate about women in the 1790s, addressing their nature, their capacities and their roles. These issues had become increasingly topical in the course of the eighteenth century, in medical and educational writings, in periodical essays from the Tatler onwards, in prose fiction and in the popular genre of conduct literature giving advice to women about proper behaviour. Increasingly women themselves contributed to the debate as a consequence of the exponential growth of printed publications addressed to women and the rising tide of female authorship. This book takes as its subject the contribution of a selection of 1790s English women writers to the debate. It offers a comprehensive survey of what they thought about their fellow women with regard to love, sexual desire and marriage; their domestic roles and issues of gender and female abilities including sensibility and genius. The book investigates how contemporary reviewers divided women writers into 'unsex'd' and 'proper' females. It contends that women did not passively submit, conservative and radical alike, but sought to extend their sphere of activity, to reform men, challenge gender stereotypes and propose that a woman should be a self for herself and her God, rather than for her husband.
The book acquires a new resonance in the intellectual context which they played a part in creating, for they were distinguished, then as now, by their insistence on placing Bakhtin in a larger intellectual world and probing his weaknesses. Rather than take Bakhtin's worship of the public festive culture at face value, Wills showed that concepts of publicity and privacy were shaped by the facts of gender difference, such that women writers might find gestures towards privacy, in form and content, more politically compelling than the simple act of going public. David Shepherd's discussion of Bakhtin and theories of reading was one of the first to put Bakhtin where he belongs: in the middle of an ongoing intellectual debate, where at best he might assume the role of primus, or even secondus inter pares. The final two chapters of the book focus on the status of the body and embodiment in Bakhtin, a strikingly proleptic theme in 1989, but here treated with a care and shrewdness usually missing from analyses on this topic. The thesis that Bakhtin's work consists of a sociological outside and a philosophical or theological inside is one such forcing apart. It reduces the ambiguities by insisting that the philosophical meaning of each term (dialogism, responsibility, chronotope) is the real one and the historical derivation of it mere window dressing for the Soviet censor.
family, the centrality of marriage, and the authority of the Father, the novel has, in fact, in many cases harboured and deviously celebrated quite contrary feelings. Very often the novel writes of contracts but dreams of transgressions, and in reading it, the dream tends to emerge more powerfully. (1979: 368) The history of the novel in the nineteenth century alerts us to the absolute centrality of adultery as a constitutional element of the genre.6 James Joyce, Ulysses 73 To revisit the metaphor introduced above in relation to Parnell and Ulysses, we might say
history of the novel beginning from Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, had a conception of mimesis which, though ultimately based on classical models, was much more specific in terms of time, place and character, or, in short, detail. As Ian Watt puts it in The Rise of the Novel: ‘Modern realism ... begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses: it has its
, Jane Stafford, and Mark Williams (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 9: The World Novel to 1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 15. 9 Anon, ‘What Do the People Read?’, New Zealand Spectator and Cook Strait Guardian (25 March 1854), p. 4. 10 ‘What Do the People Read?’, p. 4. 11 Charlotte Macdonald, ‘Beyond the Realm: The Loss of Culture as the Colonial Condition’, Journal of New Zealand Studies, 12 (2011), 2. 12 Thomas Bracken, ‘A Paper from Home’, collected in Lays of the Land of the Maori and the Moa (London
sealed-off and self-sufficient character, when it becomes conscious of itself as only one among other cultures and languages’. 23 According to this reading of the development of the novel, Rushdie’s work, with its energising collision of cultural accents, need not be seen as a radical break in the history of the novel but as a stage in its unfolding, the meeting of cultures in the colonial act of expropriation having created further contexts within which the novel can find ‘ever newer ways to mean ’. 24 In the late 1960s George Steiner