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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.
‘romance’, ‘novel’, ‘tale’, and ‘history’. 19 The first part of this chapter explores the ongoing debate over these generic borders and classifications, focusing on Irish gothic literature's frequent uncovering of the porousness of boundaries between fact and fiction, novel and romance – an indeterminacy as socially threatening as the overlap of past and present made manifest in Walpole's Otranto and Leland's Longsword . The second part looks more particularly at examples of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Irish gothic fiction that function as
the issue of generic unspecificity, from which in turn arises the very problem of which texts to include as novels. Brown’s study resonates well with the work of other critics who also bring out the constitutive force of canonisation. J. Paul Hunter shows in Before Novels (1990) that the wish of later critics to separate romance and novel would have been incomprehensible to early modern authors, who worked in an environment where ‘the terms “novel” and “romance” appear cozily together, not to imply a distinction but rather to catch, between them, all known fiction
commercial power, and amid challenges to colonial and political order. It was, from the start, a monstrous medium: Horace Walpole’s mixing of novel and romance forms was designed to have powerful effects on its readership, transporting them from an actual to an imaginative realm. Romances, opposed to the realism of the emerging novel form, were also monstrous: not only did they present improbable scenarios
interest, but too much produced childish fantasy (cf. Allot 1975 : 3-20). The temptation is best resisted. Understanding the debate between novel and romance as an internal matter of aesthetics, of getting the adjustment between probability and the marvellous exactly right, finally dehistoricizes it. The tension, rather, is between poetry and tragedy, on the one side, and novel and comedy on the other, the
’ are novels and romances, some of which Gisborne deems ‘unfit’ even to be ‘presented to the reader’.15 Such statements demonstrate Gisborne’s lack of faith in readerly agency. Gone is the Lockean ideal of a self actively constructed, or personalised, in the way of a commonplace book. Instead, Gisborne denies ‘youthful minds’ the agency required to impel ‘purposeful’ self- 20 Imagining women readers development. Dror Wahrman describes how the eighteenth-century notion of sympathy, which had its roots in a Lockean insistence on the primacy of external stimuli over
tendencies The generic hybridity of Jane Eyre pre-empts any stable interpretation of the novel. Summarising the complex traditions that the novel references, Delia da Sousa Correa follows a critical route that has led many scholars to assert the close intertwining of genre with gender in Jane Eyre. Borrowing most profusely from the traditions of autobiography, Bildungsroman, social-problem novel, governess novel, Gothic novel and romance, Jane Eyre also cross-references Romantic poetry, biblical parables and fairy tales (Da Sousa Correa, 2000a: 93–4). Oscillating
’ direct their attacks ‘against the female breast’, More describes how ‘the women of our country’ have been targeted by ‘novels and romances’ which ‘have been made the vehicles for vice and infidelity’ (i, 39, 41, 42). Within the Strictures, the way in which women read becomes instrumental to defending the nation from the threat posed by revolutionary France, presenting women with the opportunity to ‘come forward, and contribute their full and fair proportion towards the saving of their country . . . without blemishing the delicacy of their sex’ (i, 4). This is
of 1851 is a widely recognised and iconic painting (Ormond 2005 ). Other painters of that era were Horatio McCulloch during the 1850s and 1860s, who specialised in mountain scenery in areas such as Glencoe, and William McTaggart, famous in the 1860s to 1890s for his seascapes. Perhaps the writer who had the greatest influence on the nascent tourist industry was, of course, Sir Walter Scott. His historical novels and romances, such as Rob Roy , boosted tourism in and around Loch Katrine in the Trossachs; it is little surprise that the steamship currently sailing
of their release, despite their ‘coming of age’ narratives. These texts predated ‘the golden age’ of YA in the 1970s, when authors began to write with that 12−18 demographic in mind and a global industry began to grow. This growth continued into the 1990s, when critics state that the genre became tired and formulaic, ‘consisting of little more than problem novels and romances.’ 7 A second ‘golden age’ came just before the turn of the millennium, which Cart defines in terms of ‘artistic innovation, experimentation