Character Consciousness In Eighteenth Century Comic Fiction

The eighteenth-century novel developed amid an emerging emphasis on individualism that clashed with long-cherished beliefs in hierarchy and stability. Though the comic novelists, unlike Defoe and Richardson, avoided total involvement in the mind of any one character, they were nonetheless fundamentally concerned with the nature of consciousness. In Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction, Elizabeth Kraft examines the kind of consciousness central to comic novels of the period. It is, she asserts, individual identity conceived in social terms--a character's search for his or her place in a precarious secular order. Understanding this concept of character is vitally important to a full appreciation of eighteenth-century comic fiction. To respond validly to these fictional characters, Kraft claims, the twentieth-century reader must recapture, or recreate, the eighteenth-century self. In readings of five novels--Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Tobias Smollett's Peregrine Pickle, and Fanny Burney's Cecilia--Kraft explores the relationships among consciousness, character, and comic narrative. Fielding, Lennox, and Sterne, she argues, question the validity of narratives of consciousness. Each seeks to define the limitations as well as the virtues of the form in representing the individual and communal lives. Smollett and Burney, on the other hand, address a readership that expects the novel to offer meaningful renderings of person experience. These novelists accept the validity of the narrative of consciousness but place this narrative within the context of the larger community. As a thorough analysis of relations between narrative and the construction of character and consciousness, Kraft's study is an important addition to our understanding of the theoretical formulations of eighteenth-century fiction.

The English novel written between 1700 and 1740 remains a comparatively neglected area. In addition to Daniel Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders are landmarks in the history of English fiction, many other authors were at work. These included such women as Penelope Aubin, Jane Barker, Mary Davys, and Eliza Haywood, who made a considerable contribution to widening the range of emotional responses in fiction. These authors, and many others, continued writing in the genres inherited from the previous century, such as criminal biographies, the Utopian novel, the science fictional voyage, and the epistolary novel. This annotated bibliography includes entries for these works and for critical materials pertinent to them. The volume first seeks to establish the existing studies of the era, along with anthologies. It then provides entries for a wide-ranging selection of works which cover fictional, theoretical, historical, political, and cultural topics, to provide a comprehensive background to the unfolding and understanding of prose fiction in the early 18th century. This is followed by an alphabetical listing of novels, their editions, and any critical material available on each. The next section provides a chronological record of significant and enduring works of fiction composed or translated in this period. The volume concludes with extensive indexes.

Explores the significant presence of Shakespeare in major novels of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.

Eighteenth-century British literary history was long characterized by two central and seemingly discrete movements—the emergence of the novel and the development of Romantic lyric poetry. In fact, recent scholarship reveals that these genres are inextricably bound: constructions of interiority developed in novels changed ideas about what literature could mean and do, encouraging the new focus on private experience and self-perception developed in lyric poetry. In Lyric Generations, Gabrielle Starr rejects the genealogy of lyric poetry in which Romantic poets are thought to have built solely and directly upon the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. She argues instead that novelists such as Richardson, Haywood, Behn, and others, while drawing upon earlier lyric conventions, ushered in a new language of self-expression and community which profoundly affected the aesthetic goals of lyric poets. Examining the works of Cowper, Smith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats in light of their competitive dialogue with the novel, Starr advances a literary history that considers formal characteristics as products of historical change. In a world increasingly defined by prose, poets adapted the new forms, characters, and moral themes of the novel in order to reinvigorate poetic practice.

This volume highlights the variety of forms comedy took in England, with reference to developments in Europe, particularly France, during the European Enlightenment. It argues that comedy in this period is characterized by wit, satire, and humor, provoking both laughter and sympathetic tears. Comic expression in the Enlightenment reflects continuities and engagements with the comedy of previous eras; it is also noted for new forms and preoccupations engendered by the cultural, philosophical, and political concerns of the time, including democratizing revolutions, increasing secularization, and growing emphasis on individualism. Discussions emphasize the period's stage comedy and acknowledge comic expression in various forms of print media including the emerging literary form we now know as the novel. Contributions from scholars reflect a wide variety of interests in the field of 18th-century studies, and the inclusion of a generous number of illustrations throughout demonstrates that the period's visual culture was also an important part of the Enlightenment comic landscape. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter and ethics. These eight different approaches to Enlightenment comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

The epistolary novel is a form which has been neglected in most accounts of the development of the novel. This book argues that the way that the eighteenth-century epistolary novel represented consciousness had a significant influence on the later novel. Critics have drawn a distinction between the self at the time of writing and the self at the time at which events or emotions were experienced. This book demonstrates that the tensions within consciousness are the result of a continual interaction between the two selves of the letter-writer and charts the oscillation between these two selves in the epistolary novels of, amongst others, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney and Charlotte Smith.

Today, in the era of the spoiler alert, "surprise" in fiction is primarily associated with an unexpected plot twist, but in earlier usage, the word had darker and more complex meanings. Originally denoting a military ambush or physical assault, surprise went through a major semantic shift in the eighteenth century: from violent attack to pleasurable experience, and from external event to internal feeling. In Surprise, Christopher R. Miller studies that change as it took shape in literature ranging from Paradise Lost through the novels of Jane Austen. Miller argues that writers of the period exploited and arbitrated the dual nature of surprise in its sinister and benign forms. Even as surprise came to be associated with pleasure, it continued to be perceived as a problem: a sign of ignorance or naïveté, an uncontrollable reflex, a paralysis of rationality, and an experience of mere novelty or diversion for its own sake. In close readings of exemplary scenes—particularly those involving astonished or petrified characters—Miller shows how novelists sought to harness the energies of surprise toward edifying or comic ends, while registering its underpinnings in violence and mortal danger. In the Roman poet Horace’s famous axiom, poetry should instruct and delight, but in the early eighteenth century, Joseph Addison signally amended that formula to suggest that the imaginative arts should surprise and delight. Investigating the significance of that substitution, Miller traces an intellectual history of surprise, involving Aristotelian poetics, Cartesian philosophy, Enlightenment concepts of the passions, eighteenth-century literary criticism and aesthetics, and modern emotion theory. Miller goes on to offer a fresh reading of what it means to be "surprised by sin" in Paradise Lost, showing how Milton’s epic both harks back to the symbolic functions of violence in allegory and looks ahead to the moral contours of the novel. Subsequent chapters study the Miltonic ramifications of surprise in the novels of Defoe, Haywood, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, as well as in the poems of Wordsworth and Keats. By focusing on surprise in its inflections as emotion, cognition, and event, Miller’s book illuminates connections between allegory and formal realism, between aesthetic discourse and prose fiction, and between novel and lyric; and it offers new ways of thinking about the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of the novel as the genre emerged in the eighteenth century.

Aphra Behn, Susannah Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald were the only four female playwrights in England with multiple comic successes from 1670-1800. Behn's interest in the body, Centlivre's fascination with written contracts, Cowley's nationalism, and Inchbald's discussion of divorce emerge in the comic events that are animated by the psychological mechanisms of humor. Attending to the dialogue between these comic events and the plays' more predictable comic endings illuminates the philosophical, political, and legal arguments about women and marriage that fascinated both female playwrights and the theatergoing public.