17th-18th CENTURIES

THE ENGLISH NOVEL

By Marisa Fidalgo
 Historical Background
 Age of political and social turmoil.
 English settlement abroad (colonies in America,
Caribbean and Asia) BRITISH EMPIRE
 Internal and external wars. Powerful navy and
army.
 Importance of agriculture and landowners.
 Monarchy versus Parliament
 JAMES I
• Gunpowder Plot: Catholics vs Protestants
• Divine right of the monarchy.
 CHARLES I «The Enlightement»
• Totalitarian ruler against the Parliament
• Failure wars, debt of the monarchy(fines)
• Dissolved Parliament for 11 years
ENGLISH CIVIL WAR
(1642-1651)
 Royalists against Parliamentarists
 Charles I beheaded

 OLIVER CROMWELL(1649-1651)
• New leader and ruler, strict, dictator, Puritan
• Freedom of worship, independant churches
• Interregnum, several parliaments, republic
commonwealth.
 RESTORATION (1660)
 CHARLES II «The Merry Monarch»
• Catholic, patron of arts and sciences

(F. Bacon, Wren, Newton, Purcell)

• Founder of the Royal Society
• Plague, Great Fire of London (1666)
 JAMES II
• Catholic, despotic
• Dethroned and sent to France
 MARY AND WILLIAM OF ORANGE
• Bill of Rights ( 1689) No Catholic kings
• Act of Union (1707) England/Scotland united
 GEORGE I /GEORGE II (Hanover dinasty)
• Monarch passive figure
• Prevalence of Parliament and Prime Minister
• Political parties: Whigs(liberal) Tories (cons)
• Loss of American Colonies (1776)
• Gregorian calendar
• Daily newspapers and circulating libraries
 Novel: Definition
 a fictional prose narrative of considerable
length, typically having a plot that is
unfolded by the actions, speech, and
thoughts of the characters

 From French nouvelle Italian novella (new)

 Not all novels are written in prose
 It can mix other genres, epic, pastoral poetry,
tragedy etc.
 Beginnings
 Elizabethan times: French romance, pastoral, idealism,
influence of picaresque.
Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1590)
 17th century England: diaries, journals,
(auto)biographies, letters, realism, development of
characters
Aphra Behn’s Oronooko, or The Royal Slave (1688)
first humanitarian novel
John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim's Progress (1678)
 Rise of the novel
 18th century novels grew in production,
published in instalments, realism. Drama
Developed characters.
Dafoe, Fielding, Swift, Sterne, Richardson
 Reading became popular. Libraries available
 Start of journalism and newspapers:

“The Times” (1785)

 1st Dictionary of English

Samuel Johnson ( 1747-55)

 Why
 Rise of the middle classes in Western Europe
 Profound social and economic
 advances in the technology of printing
 written texts available to a growing population of readers
 changes in ways of distribution and in literacy rates
 brought books and pamphlets to populations excluded from
education ( working-class men and women of all classes)
 authors became free agents in the literary marketplace
 dependent on popular sales for success and sustenance
 Not depending on a patron (nobility)
 Antinovel campaign
 Attacks on the new genre grew
 Identified with French romance
 Seen as sensationalistic and immoral
 Considered antithetical to English values
 Campaign results
 legitimation of novels that displayed non-romantic
features.
 Women started to write to show decorum and piety
 Features
 Realism, description, attention to
detail to show veracity
 Characters: contemporary names,
fighting for survival or social success,
self- conscious
 Show chronological order of events
and new settings
 Simple and clear language
 Focus on middle-class protagonists
 Who
RICHARDSON

DEFOE
FIELDING

SWIFT

STERNE
What
 Types
 Epistolary novel
 Realistic novel
 Picaresque novel
 Philosophic novel
 Epic novel
 Experimental novel (meta-novel)
 Epistolary novel
 Greatest popularity in England and France from the mid-
1700s to the end of the century
 Plot, shows the character’s thoughts is advanced by letters or
journal entries of one or more characters
 Samuel Richardson Pamela (1740)

 the first example of the epistolary novel

 Pamela tells her story in letters to

friends or family or journal entries.

 It was used to teach and entertain

 It tells the story of a 15 year old maid servant who

resists her master’s attempts to seduce her

“And pray, said I, walking on, how came I to be
his Property? What right has he in me, but such
as a Thief may plead to stolen Goods?---Why,
was ever the like heard, says she!---This is
downright Rebellion, I protest!”
“O Sir! my Soul is of equal Importance with the
Soul of a Princess; though my Quality is inferior
to that of the meanest Slave.”
“[H]er Person made me her Lover; but her
Mind made her my Wife.”
 Realistic novel
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)
English trader, writer, journalist,
Political activist, and spy
Robinson Crusoe (1719)
 Regarded as the first novel in English
 A fictional autobiography by a first person narrator
 Plot: a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote
tropical island near Trinidad, meeting natives and
fighting cannibals etc.
 Supposedly based on the real story of
Alexander Selkirk
 It’s an allegory of the development of
civilization and the British colonization.
 Represents economic individualism

and the importance of repentance

following the strength of Defoe's
puritan religious convictions.
 Films: “Castaway” (2000)
“Robinson Crusoe” ( 1997)
 Picaresque novel
 Moll Flanders (1722) Daniel Defoe
 Written as an autobiography
 details its heroine's scandalous sexual and
criminal adventures.
 Intended to moralize but showing a woman’s
struggle for survival
 Plot: born in prison, Moll becomes a wife , a
lover, a thief, a widow, a plantation owner, a
prisoner….
 Philosophic satiric novel
 Jonathan Swift ( 1667-1745)
• Born in Dublin, Anglican priest in Ireland
satirist, political activist, ensayist,
supporter of Irish causes.
Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
 A satire on human nature. A philosophical novel
 A parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre
 A satirical view of the state of European
government, and of simple differences
between religions
 Is man born corrupt or is it corrupted?
 The character Gulliver develops along the novel.
 We see the protagonist and the antagonists’ views.
 Divided in four parts: Each part is the reverse of the
preceding part—Gulliver is big/small/wise/ignorant, the
countries are complex/simple/scientific/natural, and the forms
of government are worse/better than England's.

 1st voyage: Lilliput (friendly but ridiculous small people)

 2nd voyage: Brobdingnag ( giants proud of themselves)
 3rd voyage: Laputa ( thoughtful miserable people)
 4th voyage: Houyhnhnms and yahoos ( rational horses)
 Epic novel
Henry Fielding Tom Jones (1749)
 Epic Comic romance, written in 18 books
 Un-heroic hero - 'ordinary' person
 Omniscient, 1st person narrator
 Wide social and human topics ( greed, marriage,
wisdom, hypocrisy, fortune, prejudice)
 Great development of characters and plot
 Experimental novel
Laurence Sterne Tristram Shandy (1759)
 One of the greatest comic novels
in English
 Irregular plot with digressions in time
 The narrator is the author of the novel
and the main character, he addresses the reader to show
his opinions and provoke self-reflection and critical judgement.
 Includes different stories and materials as essays, sermons,
legal documents, drawings and
definitions of the novel itself.
 Plot: Tristram Shandy’s story and other
events, disasters and accidents in his life.
 “Men who are ill-natured and quarrelsome when drunk are
very worthy persons when sober. For drink in reality doth not
reverse nature or create passions in men which did not exist in
them before. It takes away the guard of reason and
consequently forces us to produce those symptoms which
many when sober have art enough to conceal.”
Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
 “I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my
opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my
character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by the one, would
give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed further
with me, the slight acquaintance which is now beginning
betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us
is in fault, will terminate in friendship.” Laurence Sterne, The
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
 Your task
 Find information about women writers of
the period ( i.e Aphra Benn)
 Find about Crusoe’s companion in the
isle.
 Find other examples of epistolary novels
 What other picaresque novels do you
know?
 Find the plot of the four journeys in
Gulliver’s Travels.