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Eighteenth century
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Gulliver's
Travels
Jonathan
Swift
1667-1745
Everyone knows at least something about Gulliver's Travels.
Variously read and re-written as a children's story, a political
satire, a travel text, an animated film, and a BBC television
series, Swift's perennial classic has been bowdlerized, added
to, argued over, and adapted, but remains a constant presence in
any widely accepted canon of English Literature.
The narrative follows the adventures of innocent abroad, Lemuel
Gulliver, from misguided youth, through the distorting mirrors
of Lilliput and Brobdignag, onto the more enigmatic islands of
Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and Japan, followed
by the crucially important land of the Houyhnhms and the Yahoos.
Swift masterfully inserts such locations into the blank spaces
of eighteenth-century maps (actually included in the first
edition) and follows the conventions of the contemporary travel
narrative with such precision that the real and the fantastical
coalesce. Our only guide is Gulliver, whose unwavering
confidence in the superiority of the Englishman and of English
culture is slowly and inevitably picked apart by the assorted
characters he encounters on his travels, some minute, some huge,
some misguided, some savage, others guided entirely by reason.
All offer comments to, and perspectives upon Gulliver, that
force readers to question their own assumptions.lt is a satire
that may have lost some of its immediate political force, but
one that still has a sting in its tail for us today, made all
the more effective as Swift stages the climax of the tales
within the bounds of the English nation-state.The vehemence with
which Gulliver eschews the company of his fellows for his horses
is an image that will remain with readers forever—for it is here
that it becomes clear that he is not the main target of the
satire. We are.
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A Tale of a Tub
Jonathan
Swift
1667-1745
In A Tale of a Tub, Swift adopts the persona of a hapless,
pontificating satirist in order to savage a numberof
contemporary pieties and practices. Once the reader has battled
through a welter of Apologies, Addresses, Dedications, and a
Preface, the "author" of the piece introduces a religious
allegory which is supposed to depict the decadence of the
Catholic Church and the necessity of its Reformation. The tale
concerns three brothers who abuse their father's legacy of
coats—which they are forbidden to embellish by the terms of his
will.They proceed to wilfully misinterpret the will in order to
follow the dictates of fashion. One brother, Peter, swindles his
way into a position of great authority and wealth, while the
other brothers rebel and strip their coats of the fripperies
they had once coveted. The tale is complicated by the teller's
incompetence: he finds the allegory impossible to sustain and
cannot resist embarking on absurd tangents, including" A
Digression in Praise of Digressions."
Swift's main targets are witless propagandists for Calvinism,
but the flexibility of the genre, pushed to its limits by the
invention of an insane "author," sanctions free-wheeling
assaults which threaten the viability of Swift's own
perspective—even satire itself is satirized. The force of A Tale
of a Tub is attributable to this almost autonomous ironic
energy, capable of undermining anything with a power that even
Swift's subsequent and more famous masterpieces rarely equalled.
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A Modest
Proposal
Jonathan
Swift
1667-1745
Or, more properly, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children
of Poor People from Being a Burden to Their Parents, Or the
Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public. The title
is long but Swift's propagandizing pamphlet is as succinct and
excoriating a work of satire as is possible to conceive. Penned
after its author returned to Dublin to become Dean of St.
Patrick's, the work expresses in equal measure contempt for
English policy in Ireland and for Irish docility in taking it. A
prolific writer, political journalist, and wit, Swift was
skilled at transforming outrage to glacial irony.
The proposal here is anything but modest; Irish children can
become less burdensome to their families and the state by being
eaten by the rich. Children might become quality livestock for
poor farmers. Young children, Swift suggests, are "nourishing
and wholesome" whether they are "stewed, roasted, baked, or
broiled" while older, less obviously tasty offspring might be
spared for breeding purposes. The abundant advantages include
reducing the numbers of "Papists'; providing much-needed funds
for the peasantry, boosting national income, and stimulating the
catering trade. Swift also satirizes the callousness of the
English protestant absentee landowners whose economics value
mercantilism ahead of labor power. While, across his oeuvre,
Swift is notoriously complicated in his politics, in this
pungent pamphlet, we find him at his savage best.
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Robinson Crusoe
Daniel
Defoe
1660-1731
Robinson Crusoe is thought by many to be the first English
novel. It has haunted the literary and critical imagination
since its publication, returning in guise after guise: in The
Swiss Family Robinson; in Robert Zemeckis's movie Castaway; in
J.M.Coetzee's novel Foe. The novel presents us with a
fundamental scenario. The prolonged and intense solitude of
Robinson, shipwrecked on a desert island, strips him of the
tools that have allowed him to live, and confronts him with the
essential problems of his existence. In the vast silence even
words begin to desert him. He tries to keep a diary in order to
stay in touch with his civilized self, but the small supply of
watered-down ink that he salvages from the shipwreck gradually
starts to fail and the words that he writes eventually
disappear, leaving Robinson's diary as blank as his horizon.
This encounter with total solitude does not lead Robinson to
madness, to silence, or to despair. Rather, Robinson finds in
solitude the basis for a new kind of writing, and a new kind of
self-consciousness. Just as he fashions new tools for himself
from the materials that he has to hand, so he invents a new way
of telling himself the story of his life and of his world. It is
this narrative form that Robinson bequeaths to a world on the
brink of Enlightenment, the narrative form in which we continue,
even now, to tell ourselves the stories of our lives.
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Moll Flanders
Daniel
Defoe
1660-1731
A master of plain prose, powerful narrative, and realistic
detail, Daniel Defoe is regarded by many as the first true
novelist. Appearing three years after his most famous work,
Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders stands as one of the important
precursors to the modern novel. Narrated in the first person,
the novel relates the autobiography of Moll Flanders. Moll leads
an eventful life which includes travel with gypsies, five
marriages, incest, prostitution, and twelve years as one of
London's most notorious and successful thieves. When she is
finally caught, she escapes the death sentence with the help of
a minister who encourages her to repent her evil ways.
Transported to Virginia with one of her husbands, she buys her
freedom, sets up as a planter, and increases her amassed wealth
with the income from a plantation. In her old age, she returns
to England where she resolves to spend the rest of her years in
penitence for the life she has led.
Defoe paints an unforgettable picture of the seamy underside of
England. A masterful gold digger, conniver, and survivor, Moll
exploits her formidable talents to evade poverty. The novel's
power lies in the force and attraction of Moll's character which
catches the reader's imagination and sympathy. But it also lies
in the delightfully subversive moral of the tale which seems not
to be that wickedness will be punished, but rather that one can
live a profligate life and not only get away with it, but in
fact prosper from it too.
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Roxana
Daniel
Defoe
1660-1731
While Roxana, Defoe's last and most complex novel, is less
familiar among general readers than Robinson Crusoe, it has been
well known to those interested in the development of the novel,
because of its frank portrayal of its heroine's fate—her early
destitution and the exchanging of her body for food and shelter,
her many children and their abandonment, her lovers, her failed
reformations, and her enormous wealth.
Perhaps more important, however, than this list of sexual,
social, and financial adventures is the voice that Defoe lends
Roxana. In a notorious scene, Roxana puts her maidservant Amy
into bed with her landlord-lover, saying to herself, and to us
in effect, "I'm not a wife, but a whore, and I want my maid to
be a whore too, and yet I am a wife and Amy is not a whore but a
victim, and yet we'll do it all again'.' Such a voice, both
self-estranging and self-engaging, becomes the string on which
the events of the novel are strung, including relations with a
French Prince, with the King of England, with a leading
financial adviser, with an honest Dutch merchant. Scandalously,
Roxana gets her children out of the way almost as soon as she
has them, but towards the end, her daughter Susan, who has found
employment as a servant girl in Roxana's own house, comes back
to haunt her mother with a child's cry for recognition.
Significantly Roxana's name is also Susan, and in this climax of
self-confrontation the novel descends inconclusively towards a
final abandonment.
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Love in Excess
Eliza
Haywood
1693-1756
Eliza Haywood's three-volume tale recounts the experiences of
one Count D'elmont as he finds— and loses—his way along the
often treacherous path to romantic and sexual fulfilment. Part
the dashing hero and part the profligate rake, through the fault
of others as well as his own, D'elmont becomes enmeshed in a
series of compromising relationships. D'elmont's devotion to the
lovely Melliora is the object of dispute throughout, and when
this relationship is not directly under threat from such
ambitious women as Alovisa, D'elmont himself indirectly
threatens it through his participation in a range of complex
menages a trois. Letters intended to circulate privately between
lovers are continuously intercepted, and lovers are farcically
substituted to comic and tragic effect. However, as the title of
the piece suggests, it is not long before D'elmont and others
learn the importance of romantic moderation in a world otherwise
characterized by passionate excess. When he replaces the
mercenary marital ambitions of his early years with the mature
embracing of conjugal affection, the hero eventually chooses his
spouse based upon moderation,fidelity,and reserve.
Along with Robinson Crusoe, Love in Excess was one of the most
popular early eighteenth-century novels. Haywood's frank
treatment of desire and sexual passion renders her a key figure
in the feminine tradition of amatory fiction that runs from
Aphra Behn to Delarivier Manley and beyond.
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Joseph Andrews
Henry
Fielding
1707-1754
Joseph Andews actually begins as a "sequel" to Shamelo,
Fielding's short burlesque of Richardson's sensationally popular
Pamela. However, it quickly surpasses the original, displaying
Fielding's progress toward an original fictional voice and
technique, and revealing his moral preoccupation with the
question of "good nature"asthe basis for real virtue.
In a comic inversion of typical gender roles, Joseph (Pamela's
brother and a servant in the Booby household) virtuously resists
the lustful advances of Mrs. Booby, not because he lacks
masculine vigor (unthinkable for a Fielding hero), but because
he faithfully loves the beautiful Fanny Goodwill. When he is
dismissed by his irate mistress, Joseph embarks on a picaresque
series of adventures with Parson Abraham Adams, who overshadows
Joseph as the most vigorous presence in the novel. Adams' virtue
is matched by his naivete, continually entangling him and his
companions in difficulties that test his good nature. Nabokov,
among others, noted the cruelty of Joseph Andrews; Fielding
seems to relish placing his virtuous heroes and heroines in
compromising positions. The foolishness and eccentricity of both
the Parson and Joseph, however, are vindicated by their physical
and moral courage, their loyalty, and their benevolence—the
comic morality of Don Quixote is an obvious model. Fielding
manipulates the conventions of romance to bring about a happy
ending, with a wink to his readers to acknowledge its
artificiality.
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Tom Jones
Henry
Fielding
1707-1754
Tom Jones is a picaresque comic novel in which we follow the
wanderings and vicissitudes of the engaging hero as he, born
illegitimate, grows up, falls in love, is unjustly expelled from
his foster-father's home, and roams England. Warmhearted but
impetuous, Tom is repeatedly involved in fights,
misunderstandings, and bawdy adventures. However, he is
eventually narrowly saved from the gallows and happily united
with his true love, Sophia, while his enemies are variously
humiliated.
This is not only a long and complicated novel but also a great
one. Anticipating Dickens at his best (Dickens reportediy said,
"I have been Tom Jones"), Fielding describes, with gusto, glee,
mock-heroic wit, and sometimes satiric scorn, the rich variety
of life in eighteenth-century England, from the rural poor to
the affluent aristocrats. Like his friend Hogarth's paintings,
Fielding's descriptions imply the sharp observation of a
moralist who is well aware of the conflict between Christian
standards, which should officially govern social conduct, and
the power of selfishness, folly, and vice in the world. In the
society he depicts, Good Samaritans are few and far between, and
snares await the innocent at every turn. Nevertheless, like an
ironic yet benevolent Providence, Fielding guides the deserving
lovers through the world's corruption to their happiness.
Maintaining the spirit of Chaucer, Fielding relished farcical
entanglements and sexual comedy: his hero is no virgin. Fielding
was a brilliant experimentalist (influencing Sterne), and Tom
Jones is delightfully postmodernistic: the narrator repeatedly
teasingjy interrupts the action to discuss with the reader the
work's progress—critics are urged to "mind their own business."
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Roderick Random
Tobias
George Smollett
1721-1771
Smollett's first novel is an account of the varied adventures of
the quixotic Roderick Random. Praised for Smollett's depiction
of the harsh realities of British naval life, Roderick Random is
more than just a vivid account of life aboard a man-of-war. The
novel follows Roderick as he travels the world attempting to
find his own path both financially and morally. Despite his
overriding roguish and crude behaviour, Roderick's education and
eloquence help establish him as impoverished but gentlemanly.
For Roderick, adversity provides moral education and
improvement. However, it is only when he regains his true social
standing and reclaims his paternal estate that Roderick is truly
reformed.
Despite declaring his love for Narcissa, Roderick repeatedly
engages in aimless and indiscriminate sexual relations with
other women. His double standards are not consistently punished
and he is ultimately rewarded in gaining Narcissa as a wife.
However, Smollett's interpolated narrative, "The History of Miss
Williams" provides a critical backdrop for Roderick's own sexual
activity. This account of a woman who succumbs to her own sexual
desire and descends into prostitution provides a sympathetic,
although not condoning, portrayal. Roderick Random is a novel
full of unexpected and peculiar twists and turns, and by the
conclusion alert readers cannot entirely forgive Roderickfor his
debauchery.
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Peregrine
Pickle
Tobias
George Smollett
1721-1771
The exploits of the egotistical Peregrine Pickle are the subject
of Smollett's second novel. While the episodic construction and
interpolated narratives are reminiscent of Roderick Random,
Peregrine Pickle is more than a repetition of an earlier
narrative. Peregrine is a fallible hero and this is emphasiszed
by the frequently critical tone of the third-person omniscient
narrator. The son of a short line of moderately successful
merchants, Peregrine is despised by his own mother and adopted
by his eccentric uncle, whose exploits provide much of the humor
in the early part of the novel. Peregrine enjoys a privileged
education that compounds his own misguided sense of
self-importance. He undertakes the Grand Tour, traveling through
Europe amid a profusion of excess, sexual intrigue, and rakish
conduct and, on his return to London, attempts to ingratiate
himself into fashionable society and political circles. He
aspires to marriage with an heiress as a way of rising to the
ranks of the nobility. However, Peregrine's ambitions are
thwarted by his own destructive and corrupt behavior,
demonstrating his inability to conduct himself in a manner
appropriate to his financial standing. Eventually, during his
incarceration in the Fleet prison, Pickle reforms. He marries
Emilia and adopts the life of a country gentleman removed from
the evils of fashionable society.
Despite its scatological humor, Smollett's satire engages with
serious concerns such as the arbitrariness of French justice and
the threat posed to social order by contemporary
commercialization. Peregrine has to learn the responsibilities
and privileges of social position before he can truly value his
ultimate reward: a quiet life of felicity with his beloved
Emilia.
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Humphry Clinker
Tobias
George Smollett
1721-1771
Smollett's last novel is an epistolary narrative detailing the
travels through Britain of Matt Bramble and his company
including the servant hero, the impoverished Humphry Clinker.
The letters reveal the characters of their very different
authors. Matt Bramble is a hypochondriac misanthrope, his sister
Tabitha, an aging husband-hunter, Jery Melford their nephew, an
exuberant Oxford student, his sister Lydia a naive sentimental
romantic, and Tabitha's maid, Wyn Jenkins, a virtually
illiterate social climber. These varied points of view provide a
lively and wide-ranging narrative that engages the reader
directly in deciphering not only the progress and adventures of
the party but also the targets of Smollett's satire. The
narrative allows for multiple interpretations of the events that
unfold, and there is no one authoritative version. However,
Clinker's moral integrity and religious zeal are constant
throughout the accounts.
The party continually encounters mishap, with Clinker invariably
at the center. Such mishaps include duels, romantic intrigues,
jealous encounters, a false imprisonment, and innumerable
disputes both large and smatl. Finally the love matches are
made, and the plot tied up. Unlike Smollett's other titular
heroes, Clinker reaps a reward that is unquestionably deserved.
His naivety regarding the ways of the world and his morality are
admirable traits, against which the flaws of his companions and
his society are clearly exposed.
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Memoirs of
Martinus Scriblerus
John Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay
John
Arbuthnot
1667-1745
The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus is an incomplete satirical
work ostensibly by the members of the Scriblerus Club but which
was principally written by John Arbuthnot. The only completed
volume was published in 1741 as a part of Alexander Pope's
Works. 'Martinus Scriblerus' was a pseudonym of Pope's which was
later also adopted by George Crabbe.
The seventeen short chapters of the Memoirs of Scribierus,
finalized by Pope, offer a series of narratives that originated
in a project begun in 1713, and continued at informal meetings
of the Scriblerus Club, which met in the lodgings Dr. Arbuthnot
occupied in St. James's Palace. The Club began to break up with
the departure of Swift from London, and completely with the
Queen's death in 1714. The project was, however, continued by
correspondence, making early use of the recently established
postal service.
The Memoirs draw on the rich store of satirical writing in
Europe: from classical sources such as Horace and Lucian to
later writers such as Rabelais, Erasmus, and Cervantes. The
"learned phantome" Martinus Scriblerus has with "capacity
enough, dipped into every art and science, but injudiciously."
The Scriblerians target the modern age as the site of vaunting,
false taste, corruption, and bad faith. In their critique of
modern writing in the expanding print culture, they contrast
ancient grandeur, passion, dignity, reason, and common sense
with modern excess and venal behavior.
Here many strategies are employed: direct narrative, comic
analysis, and exposition. Some of the works of the Scriblerians
are themselves related to the Memoirs: for instance. Pope's
Dunciad, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Gay's The Beggar's Opera.
Nor are the Memoirs without modern descendants, such as
J.K.Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (1980).
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Pamela
Samuel
Richardson
1689-1761
This book is undoubtedly the most famous erotic novel in
English. Published in 1749 (though possibly written, in part,
some time earlier), it is rooted in a realistically depicted
eighteenth-century London, firmly connecting Cleland's work with
that of his contemporaries, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollet.
At the beginning, Fanny is a beautiful fifteen-year-old country
girl. Having lost her "innocence," she learns to exploit her
sexuality to survive and advance herself in the world. In
fashioning this controversial and illicitly popular work,
Cleiand drew on the largely French fashion for erotic fiction,
and the existing genre of "whore's autobiography/'which tended
to present the whore's life as a warning against the miseries
attendant on sexual indulgence. Strikingly, Cleiand feels no
compulsion to punish Fanny for her promiscuity, and she ends the
novel happily married.
Aware that much pornography suffered from repetitiveness,
Cleiand eschews "crude" or slang terminology for sexual acts or
organs, instead producing a dazzling array of metaphors and
similes from a seemingly endless supply. Although he
unflinchingly depicts the physiological pleasure of sex, for
both men and women, Fanny's sexual appetites are surprisingly
conservative'—while relishing various heterosexual acts, she is
conflicted about her own lesbian encounter, and repeatedly
speaks with disgust about male homosexuality.
After surviving more than two centuries' worth of moral
opprobrium, Cleland's masterpiece has now emerged as an
important work in the development of the novel. lt still,
however, divides readers, between those who find its vibrant
depiction of sexuality liberating, and those who see it as a
transparent vehicle for male gratification.
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Clarissa
Samuel
Richardson
1689-1761
Richardson's ambitious narrative of tragic seduction is traced
through the hundreds of letters written between Clarissa Harlowe,
her confidante Anna Howe, the charming, but also cruel and
duplicitous seducer Lovelace, and a supporting cast of family
and acquaintances. In reading them, we find ourselves slowly
absorbed into their individual personalities. Meaning is thus
accumulated in each successive letter, but their sequence has
its own dramatic structure and tension, maintained for the
novel's length. Through this we are made to confront not only
Lovelace's terrible manipulations, but also his power of
allusive evocation, which flow from the same source. In a
similar manner, Clarissa triumphantly claims her constant self,
virtuous through and beyond death, but is reliant upon a
complementary capacity for self-deception that uses the measure
of her pen to calculate the distance between thought and action
in those she observes. Henry James counted himself among
Clarissa's later admirers, perhaps because Richardson's
achievement offered him a model for his own: the prose of
suspicion, uncovering a similarly disconcerting awareness
between its lines. Like Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things
Past (1913-27), the sheer scale of Clarissa means that it can
seem a novel that is more talked about than read. Yet for those
readers who are prepared to spend time with it, Clarissa offers
a proportionate amount of satisfaction.
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Fanny Hill
John
Cleland
1709-1789
This book is undoubtedly the most famous erotic novel in
English. Published in 1749 (though possibly written, in part,
some time earlier), it is rooted in a realistically depicted
eighteenth-century London, firmly connecting Cleland's work with
that of his contemporaries, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollet.
At the beginning, Fanny is a beautiful fifteen-year-old country
girl. Having lost her "innocence," she learns to exploit her
sexuality to survive and advance herself in the world. In
fashioning this controversial and illicitly popular work,
Cleiand drew on the largely French fashion for erotic fiction,
and the existing genre of "whore's autobiography/'which tended
to present the whore's life as a warning against the miseries
attendant on sexual indulgence. Strikingly, Cleiand feels no
compulsion to punish Fanny for her promiscuity, and she ends the
novel happily married.
Aware that much pornography suffered from repetitiveness,
Cleiand eschews "crude" or slang terminology for sexual acts or
organs, instead producing a dazzling array of metaphors and
similes from a seemingly endless supply. Although he
unflinchingly depicts the physiological pleasure of sex, for
both men and women, Fanny's sexual appetites are surprisingly
conservative'—while relishing various heterosexual acts, she is
conflicted about her own lesbian encounter, and repeatedly
speaks with disgust about male homosexuality.
After surviving more than two centuries' worth of moral
opprobrium, Cleland's masterpiece has now emerged as an
important work in the development of the novel. lt still,
however, divides readers, between those who find its vibrant
depiction of sexuality liberating, and those who see it as a
transparent vehicle for male gratification.
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Amelia
Henry
Fielding
1707-1754
Amelia,
Fielding's final novel, is quite unlike his exuberant earlier
fictions. With a sober, even documentary narrative technique,
Fielding focuses unblinkingly upon the squalor, misery, and
variety of the city of London, which he approaches with an
uncompromising moral tone. For its first readers, this
production of Fielding's combined the indecorous exposure of
London life with a soft, unfocused sentimentality, failing to
satisfy in any of its aspects.
It is precisely in these topics of condemnation, however, that
the strength of Amelia lies. Within a few pages of its
beginning, the novel's hero, Captain Booth, is thrown into the
depths of Newgate Prison. There he encounters a gallery of
grotesques whose unflinching physical descriptions are matched
by a precise moral commentary, elucidating the systematic
failures and hypocrisies responsible for their creation. Booth
is himself lured back to the gaming table despite his admiration
for the good. His wife, Amelia, provides us with a paradigm of
that restoring virtue, set brilliantly against the temptresses
of the world she inhabits.
In tracing her warmth and loyalty, Fielding does not fall prey
to credulous sentimentality. Rather, he produces an encomium for
the redeeming power of married life. Not only does Amelia's
patient loyalty bring her husband economic security and social
status, their achievement of domestic contentment displays the
moral sense that will be required to reform the country they
inhabit.
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Candide
Voltaire
1694-1778
Voltaire's Condide was influenced by various atrocities of the
mid-eighteenth century, most notably an earthquake in Lisbon,
the outbreak of the horrific Seven Years' War in the German
states, and the unjust execution of the English Admiral John
Byng. This philosophical tale is often hailed as a paradigmatic
text of the Enlightenment, but it is also an ironic attack on
the optimistic beliefs of the Enlightenment. Voltaire's critique
is directed at Leibniz' principle of sufficient reason, which
maintains that nothing can be so without there being a reason
why it is so. The necessary consequence of this principle is the
belief that the actual world must be the best of all possible
worlds, since anything else would be inconsistent with the
creative power of God.
At the opening of the novel, its eponymous hero, the young
Candide, schooled in this optimistic philosophy by his tutor
Pangloss, is ejected from the magnificent castle in which he is
raised. The rest of the novel details the multiple hardships and
disasters which Candide and his various companions meet in their
travels. These include war, rape, theft, hanging, shipwreck,
earthquake, cannibalism, and slavery. As these experiences
gradually erode Candide's optimistic belief, the novel
mercilessly lampoons science, philosophy, religion, government,
and literature. A caustic and comic satire of the social ills of
its day, Candide's reflections on human injustice, disaster,
suffering, and hope remain as pertinent now as ever.
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Julie; or, the
New Eloise
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712-1778
Julie, Rousseau's only novel, is modeled on the medieval story
of Eloise, and the forbidden love between herself and her tutor,
Abelard. Yet in Julie, Rousseau transforms secrecy and
sinfulness into renunciation and redemption, in which it is the
pupil and not the master who makes the central claim on our
attention. Julie's relationship with her teacher, Saint-Preux,
reformulates the twelfth-century conflict between bodily desire
and religious purpose into a characteristically
eighteenth-century study of right behavior. In this epistolary
novel, Rousseau links the classical tradition of civic virtue
with its Enlightenment counterpart of domestic order and the new
birth of individual feeling which was to eventually culminate in
the Romantic movement.
As befits this apparently paradoxical transition, the thematic
structure of Julie is both rigorous and odd. In the first half,
Julie alternately resists and is consumed by Saint-Preux's
passion, which leads to his banishment from her father's house.
By the second, he has returned to the new estate formed by Julie
and her husband, Wolmar, where all three happily co-exist in the
cultivation of both mind and landscape. In this static Elysium,
the dangerous desires of the novel's first part are ethically
recapitulated. For readers, this allegorical mirroring of virtue
and desire makes Julie's triumph somewhat suspect. However, the
irreducibility of the problem makes the difficulty of Rousseau's
novel a persistently contemporary one.
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Reveries of a Solitary
Walker
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712-1778
Rousseau—philosopher, social and political theorist,
novelist, and proto-Romantic—was one of the eighteenth century's
leading intellectuals. Reveries of the Solitary Walker, the last
book he wrote, is a wonderfully lyrical, heartfelt, and somewhat
obsessive account of an aging man's reckoning with his past.
Rousseau achieved a great deal of notoriety during his lifetime
from a succession of popular and hugely important works. By
attacking the state religion and denouncing contemporary society
as morally corrupt, he not only challenged the establishment but
also the Enlightenment thought that prevailed in the Parisian
salons. Rousseau became the subject of a long-lasting campaign
of derision and humiliation,and eventually went into exile.
The Reveries of the Solitary Walker finds Rousseau, "alone and
neglected," torn between his love of solitude and his yearning
for company, trying to assuage his crippling self-doubt and
irrepressible need to address his persecutors. The novel's
lasting appeal stems from this compelling tension between his
sober, meditative philosophizing and his impassioned rage
against the ills of society. Rousseau wants to show that he is
at peace with himself, blissfully disengaged from society, and
yet he is also constantly betrayed by his sense of injustice and
pride. The combination of his circumstances and his inner
turmoil make him one of the first—and most fascinating—modern
examples of the prototype of the literary outsider.
Reveries is therefore a vital precursor to the great novels of
isolation and despair by writers such as Dostoevsky, Beckett,
and Salinger that have had such an enormous impact on the
development of the novel.
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Confessions
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712-1778
Unpublished until after his death, Rousseau's Confessions are a
landmark of European literature, and perhaps the most
influential autobiography ever written. This is a work that had
a defining impact not only on the novel, but on the development
of the autobiography as a literary genre. Although Rousseau
predicts having no imitators in this vein, he was seriously
mistaken. Goethe, Tolstoy, and Proust all acknowledged their
debt to Rousseau's pioneering attempt to represent his life
truthfully—warts and all.
Rousseau famously argued that man's innate good nature was
corrupted by society. Yet in the Confessions Rousseau
acknowledges that he often behaved appallingly. One incident in
particular stands out. When working as a young servant in the
household of a wealthy Geneva aristocrat, Rousseau describes how
he stole valuable old ribbon and then blamed the theft on a
servant girl, Marion. Rousseau comments that he was "the victim
of that malicious play of intrigue that has thwarted me all my
life," simultaneously accepting responsibility for his actions
and denying it.
Rousseau freely admits the contradictory nature of his
character, one he felt was forced on him by circumstances beyond
his control. Indeed, in line with his desire not to mislead the
reader, he undoubtedly exaggerates his own sins and misdemeanors
just to prove his point, which serves as yet another paradox of
this compelling, frustrating, and vitally important work.
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Emile; or, On
Education
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712-1778
Rousseau's philosophical novel charts the ideal education of an
imaginary pupil, Emile, from birth to adulthood. Emile is not
taught to read until he himself thirsts for the knowledge, and
his experience of literature is deliberately limited. According
to Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe supplies the best treatise on an
education according to nature, and it is the first book Emile
will read.
Rousseau's educational philosophy regarding religion was also
radical. He advocates delaying a child's religious education to
prevent indoctrination or ill-conceived notions about divinity.
Emile is thus not taught according to one doctrine but is
equipped with the knowledge and reason to choose for himself.
Early adolescence is a time which demands learning by experience
rather than academic study. Emile is seen to pose and answer his
own questions based on his observations of nature. During the
transition between adolescence and adulthood Rousseau begins to
focus on Emile's socialization and his sexuality.
In the final book, "Sophie: or Woman," Rousseau turns his
attention toward the education of girls and young women. In this
book, he disapproves of serious learning for girls on the basis
that men and women have different virtues. Men should study
truth; women should aim for flattery and tact. Rousseau's novel
concludes with the marriage of Emile and 5ophie,who intend to
live a secluded but fruitful life together in the country.
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Rameau's Nephew
Denis
Diderot
1713-1784
Diderot is one of the most important figures of the French
Enlightenment, a contemporary and equal of Rousseau and
Voltaire. As well as editing the world's first Encyclopedia, he
managed to create a body of work that includes novels,
philosophical dialogues, scientific essays, art, and drama
criticism. Diderot was a polymath of verve and originality, and
nowhere is this more visible than in Rameau's Nephew. Part
novel, part essay, part Socratic dialogue, it expanded the
boundaries of what is possible in fiction.
The action is straightforward. While taking a stroll in the
Palais-Royal gardens the narrator, a philosopher, bumps into the
nephew of the great composer Rameau, and they become engaged in
conversation. Underlying their discussion is the question of
morality and the pursuit of happiness, which they approach from
opposite poles. The prudish philosopher argues for the Greek
ideal of virtue being equal to happiness. The nephew, witty
cynic and lovable scoundrel, shows that conventional morality is
nothing other than vanity, that the pursuit of wealth is
society's guiding principle, and that what matters is how you
are perceived, not how you actually are. The book is not a
simple morality tale, however. Like its tragicomic hero, it is a
complex challenge to all forms of reactionary thought and
behavior. Too controversial to be published in Diderot's life
time. it is also a savage indictment of the moral hypocrisy,
intellectual pretensions,and spiritual vacuity of
eighteenth-century Parisian society.
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Jacques the Fatalist
Denis Diderot
1713-1784
Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist is among those
very few extraordinary novels that seem to anticipate the
distant future of the genre, leaping ahead of itself by one
hundred and fifty years, into the company of Samuel Beckett's
anti-fictional transgressions of the novel form. It is an
exceptionally interesting novel with an exceptionally
uninteresting plot. Like metafiction of the twentieth century,
it comments continually on its own procedures of composition and
guesses continually at the reasons why its story might have
turned out as it did, satirizing the reader's appetite for
romantic tales or the thrills of an improbable adventure.
Diderot sprinkles a few such thrills into the narrative
recounted by Jacques to his characterless Master as they roam
about, but he is always sure to announce their arrival.
Diderot was a polymath—philosopher, critic, and political
essayist; hence perhaps his distrust and comedic handling of the
novel form. His most famous literary labor, taking him almost
twenty-five years, was on the Encydopedie ou Dictionnairemisonne
des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers, the great expression of
French Enlightenment rationality co-authored, among others, by
the mathematician D'Alembert. Jacques the Fatalist, which
Diderot wrote around 1770 but never published during his
lifetime, was a curious departure into a parallel zone of
philosophical thinking, in which the so-called "problems of
existence" can be staged as farces of self-expression and
storytelling.
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The Nun
Denis Diderot
1713-1784
The playful origins of this epistolary novel, published
posthumously, are intriguing. In 1760, Denis Diderot and his
friends wrote a series of letters to the Marquis de Croismare.
The letters purported to come from Suzanne Simonin, an
illegitimate child who had been forced to take religious vows to
expiate her mother's guilt. Having escaped from the convent, she
apparently wanted the Marquis to help her annul her binding
vows. In her letters, the nun recounts the details of her
confinement against her will and describes its effect on her
understanding of religion and her faith. The novel's reputation
as a succes de scandale is due in great part to its unashamed
and explicit depiction of the narrator's encounter with the
cruelty prevalent in monastic institutions, and her attendant
discovery of eroticism and spirituality. The Nun has been
considered an attack on Catholicism, typifying the French
Enlightenment's attitude toward religion. It stirred public
opinion anew when, in 1966, the Jacques Rivette movies version
was banned for two years. More recently, The Nun has been much
discussed for its emphatic portrayal of lesbianism and
sexuality. Aimed at exposing the oppressive and unnatural
structure of life in religious institutions, the narrator's fate
at the hands of monastic power provides a striking model for
narrative, and indeed, life reversals.
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Tristram Shandy
Laurence
Sterne
1713-1768
The book's full title, The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy,
Gentleman, suggests a loosely biographical form, but the
eponymous author-narrator scarcely gets so far as his third
year, and remains studiously circumspect about his own opinions.
While little of Tristram's life is divulged, the book generates
an intimate relationship between the processes of reading and
writing. Through digressions and interruptions, narrative
expectations are dismantled with a freedom and vivacity that
eliminates the very notion of plot. With its inventive
conversation between spoken idiom and written circumspection, it
is mischievously friendly, and as lewdly suggestive as anything
that had ever been written. This book is the archetypal
"experimental" novel, prefiguring modern and postmodern fiction.
From Rabelais, Sterne develops comic fantasy, bawdy grotesque,
and learned wit. From Cervantes, Sterne takes the picaresque
combustion of narrative form, modulating into a more quixotic,
but nevertheless realistic dissection of human folly. Portraits
of Tristram's father, his mother, Uncle Toby, Yorick, Corporal
Trim, and Widow Wadman, build up an oblique but intimate
representation of family life. The comic brilliance of the
literary surface obscures Sterne's deeper psychological realism,
his almost Proustian analysis of sentimentality, notably the
well-meant but ridiculous erudition of Tristram's father. The
modulation of Toby's interest in warfare into his love-affair
offers a fine comic characterization of the links between
speech, personality, and the groin.
For all its garrulous intimacy, Sterne leaves much to the
imagination. The book's diplomatic irony provides a subtle
critique of the English gentleman, from class and sexuality to
all the unacknowledged delicacies of property and propriety.
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A Sentimental
Journey
Laurence
Sterne
1713-1768
Overshadowed by Tristram Shandy, Sterne's shorter novel is
nevertheless a comic gem. Combining autobiographical anecdote,
incidental fiction, and pastiche of travel writing, the book
chronicles the journey of Yorick and his servant La Fleur
through France. The Grand Tour, that education in continental
manners and art so important to the English gentleman, figures
as an implied object of satire. However, there is not much grand
about this journey, rather, we are confronted with a belittling
and microscopic investigation of sensibility.
More than a mere story, the principle pleasure of this novel is
its playful manipulation of conversational intimacy. The manner
of the telling takes priority, while the author-narrator leaves
different incidents suspended between sentimental
interpretations and a more knowing realism. One notable example
is a man lamenting his dead ass, related as an allegory from
nature of how feeling toward an animal might provide an edifying
example of humane fellow-feeling. The mourner has nevertheless
overworked and starved the ass he mourns. Swiftly juxtaposing
this with the unfeeling lash given to the animals on which the
author's transport depends, the allegory is shot through with
double entendres. Such gulfs between sentiment, material
conditions, and narrative point of view are always close to the
surface, even if financial considerations, earthly passions, and
a continuously implied eroticism are politely deflected.
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