Narrative Direction

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Character Development ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sense Of Purpose ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Narrative Techniques

This essay approaches Goethe’s novel from the perspective of historical shifts and new poetic models in the late eighteenth century, which took the form of a feeling of increased contingency or randomness in an individual’s life. It argues that Goethe uses narrative techniques to create a balance between the episodic and the developmental, the parts of the novel and its trajectory as a whole. Wilhelm’s character development and these formal characteristics combine to solicit imaginative engagement on the part of readers of the novel, who, in thinking about these things, may come to a better understanding of the contingency in their own lives. The essay argues that Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship offers not only a detailed depiction of contingency in human life but also a suggestion that aesthetic experience might hold out the possibility of acknowledging and managing that contingency to create a sense of purpose and meaning.

scholarly journals Interpretations of Emanuel Swedenborg’s image of the afterlife in the novel Oneiron by Laura Lindstedt

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiina Mahlamäki ◽  
Tomas Mansikka
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Postmodern Novel ◽  
Western Esotericism ◽  
The Relationship

This article discusses the relationship between Western esotericism and literature. As an example of a secular author who uses and benefits from esoteric texts, ideas and thoughts as resources in creating a literary artwork, the article analyses Laura Lindstedt’s novel Oneiron. A Fantasy About the Seconds After Death (2015). It contextualises the novel within the frames of Western esotericism and literature, focusing on Emanuel Swedenborg’s impact on discourses of the afterlife in literature. Laura Lindstedt’s postmodern novel indicates various ways that esoteric ideas, themes, and texts can work as resources for authors of fiction in twenty-first century Finland. Since the late eighteenth century Swedenborg’s influence has been evident in literature and among artists, especially in providing resources for other-worldly imagery. Oneiron proves that the ideas of Swedenborg are still part of the memory of Western culture and literature.

The One and the Manor

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Stout
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mansfield Park ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Possessive Individualism ◽  
The One ◽  
Jane West

Chapter two reassesses the conservatism of Jane Austen’s 1814 novel, Mansfield Park. It argues that we have misunderstood the novel by reading it in relation to the late eighteenth-century philosophy of Edmund Burke and socially conservative novelists like Jane West when, in fact, Mansfield Park is governed by a much older of social organization—the manor—not based on the liberal assumption of possessive individualism. Seeing the novel through the lens of the manor, the chapter argues, helps explain many of its most perplexing and difficult features: among them, the meekness of Fanny Price; the dissatisfactions of its ending; and the often distant or impersonal strategies of narration.

The Satire of Walker's Vagabond on Rousseau and Godwin

PMLA ◽  
1937 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh H. MacMullan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
The Novel ◽  
View Point ◽  
Large Section ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Century Thought

George Walker, a London bookseller and publisher, author of several Gothic tales, printed in 1799 a satirical novel, The Vagabond, directed against the Jacobins and their philosophic forerunners. The author's purpose was a serious one, to refute and counteract the works that had poured from the Jacobin presses. As a result the novel, though amusing and fanciful in the manner of the Anti-Jacobin, represents a consistent view-point and an earnest desire to show the beauties of society as then organized. In its way, it is a summary of the reactionary position, and, by giving the opinions of the opponents of Rousseau, Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, Holcroft, Paine, William Godwin, and others, illustrates a large section of late eighteenth-century thought.

scholarly journals Old World Conventions and New World Curiosities: North American Landscapes Through European Eyes

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Dewar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
New World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
Natural Landscape ◽  
Aesthetic Responses ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Intellectual Interest

Abstract This paper examines the published accounts of three British travellers, Patrick Campbell (fl. c. 1765-1823), Isaac Weld (1774-1856), and George Heriot (1759-1839), to North America in the late eighteenth century. Focusing specifically on the travellers' scientific approaches to the natural landscape, it argues that they drew on eighteenth-century European scientific developments, including empirical observation, the evolution and instability of matter, and systems of classification, to facilitate their understanding of unfamiliar phenomena. The travellers' scientific observations revealed both an intellectual interest in the origin of landforms and a utilitarian view of wildlife and natural resources. Attracted to the novel and curious, the travellers' scientific speculations merged with initial aesthetic responses, highlighting a preoccupation with the power, spontaneity and magnitude of nature.

They Were Prodigals and Enslavers

2019 ◽  
pp. 108-138
Author(s):  
Sean D. Moore
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Almost All

This chapter examines the founding of the New York Society Library as part of the trend of merchants made wealthy by slavery and related commerce establishing philanthropic and civil society institutions in the mid- and late eighteenth century. By mapping the reading network around Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in this library, it establishes that almost all of its readers from 1789–90 supported Defoe’s pro-slavery views as articulated by Crusoe’s choice to go to sea to engage in the Africa trade, and how most American editions of the novel advocated young men doing the same. The library’s City Readers database also makes it easy to inventory the other books that readers of Crusoe were reading in order to gauge the level of pro-slavery versus Manumission Society sentiment. In doing so, it provides a portrait of New York society as one in which whites of every background benefited from the slave trade.

Early Gothic Novels and the Belief in Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deidre Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Secular Culture ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Gothic Novels

This chapter looks at Gothic novels. A Gothic Romance or even ‘a Gothic Story’ may be one thing, but a Gothic Novel is something else again. Though that term has been retrospectively applied to a body of macabre, sensational, ghost-infested fiction from the late eighteenth century only since the early twentieth, in its suggestion of a perverse hybridizing of the outmoded and the up-to-date it aptly captures the transgressiveness these fictions represented for their original critics. More directly than the contemporary fictions that aspired to be life-like and observe the norms of probability, Gothic novels foreground that peculiar mental gymnastics that since the eighteenth century has enabled readers to participate in a secular culture industry ‘which invites the subtle and supple deployment of belief’. In this sense, by helping to define the frontiers of the fictive, the Gothic mode did not interrupt the rise of the novel, but instead completed it.

The Evangelical Novel

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Wood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Hannah More ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Mary Brunton ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

This essay explores the development of the Evangelical novel in the early years of the nineteenth century. Drawing primarily on the novels of Barbara Hofland, Hannah More, and Mary Brunton, as well as the Cheap Repository Tracts, the essay identifies key characteristics of the Evangelical novel and proposes a theoretical framework for analysing it as homiletic and didactic fiction. The essay positions the Evangelical novel within the religious and social context of the late eighteenth century, as well as within the history of the novel, where its generic connections to individualism and realism are examined.

Narrating ‘the modern’: Colonial-era southern Batak journalism and novelistic fiction as overlapping literary forms

2008 ◽  
Vol 163 (4) ◽  
pp. 476-506
Author(s):  
Susan Rodgers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Evolutionary Models ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Early English

As Lennard J. Davis (1997) points out in Factual fictions; The origins of the English novel, newspaper prose and novel writing had remarkably blurred boundaries throughout the late 1700s, the time when the early English novel was first gaining public currency on the popular print scene. Davis presents a complex argument. He first criticizes Ian Watt’s approach (1957) as set out in the latter’s classic The rise of the novel. Davis asserts that Watt relies on simplistic ‘evolutionary’ models about the ‘rise’ of genres. Davis goes on to observe that there was a generalized convergence of discursive forms in the English popular press and in storytelling in commercial print in the late eighteenth century.

scholarly journals De lykkelige skatteborgere

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (121) ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Jonas Ross Kjærgård
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Century Thought ◽  
The French Revolution

The article offers a contextualized reading of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s forbidden bestseller The Year 2440 (1771). It focuses on Mercier’s financial politics as these are presented both in the novel and in the author’s intervention in the public debate immediately prior to the outbreak of the French revolution. Based on a reading of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the article argues that there is a link between happiness, rights and fiscality, which has rarely been examined. Intervening in this field of discourse, Mercier is co-responsible for the establishment of the unhappiness/happiness-dichotomy that characterizes much of the French late eighteenth century thought on happiness.

scholarly journals THROE OF BEING STOLEN IN DORIS PILKINGTON’S CAPRICE - THE STOCKMAN’S DAUGHTER

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Colette Sharmila ◽  
Dr. A. JosephineAlangara Betsy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Land Resources ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Aboriginal Children ◽  
Assimilation Policy

The British controlled dominated and exploited the indigenous population in the process of colonizing Australia in the late Eighteenth Century. They appropriated the aborigines’ land, resources and wealth: they also left psychic scars of stealing their children from the indigenous families under the guise of civilization. Colonial Governments saw Aboriginals not as people who had been colonized but as heathens to be converted and institutionalized. The ‘Assimilation Policy’ as it was called advocated in all the states of Australia in order to remove the half caste aboriginal children. This paper will foreground on the psychic scars of the Stolen Generation writer Doris Pilkington’s novel Caprice - The Stockman’s Daughters. Further this paper will discuss and analyse the fear, persecution, angst desolation and the pain felt by the stolen children and their families in the novel Caprice - The Stockman’s Daughter.

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