The Novel Flashcards
Critics on the rise of the novel -
Hunter: originated in the mix of texts incorporated. Sought respectability - Richardson: moral possibilities of it. Questions such as could 1st person POV be trusted? Novels new because they had “interiority” and “scope” - different from the romance because no supernaturalism. Suggested you don’t have to look far to find the extraordinary. Key aspects: stories within stories and the “incredible capacity to include”. Didacticism “crucial to its tone, pace and effects”. Different to ancient literature because the augustans and moderns wrote for desire, not a social agenda as such. Journalism= commitment to contemporaneity; diaries = more introspection, rise of secularity!
Dabhoiwala - novels a “central conduit of moral and social education”
Key novelists and works, dates.
Samuel Richardson - Pamela (epistolary novel, 1740), Clarissa (1748).
Henry Fielding - Shamela (1741) and Tom Jones (1749)
Samuel Richardson - Pamela key info.
- Epistolary novel - new form popularised by Richardson. Initially a conduct book, then turned into a narrative.
Pamela - key themes
- New experimental form - immediacy. Honour, virtue, chastity. Parental love/guidance. Class!! Innocence. Piety. Process of writing. Language of the fall… clothes reflecting state.
Pamela - critics
Keymer - epistolary form “seemed to offer intimate access to the ebb and flow of consciousness” “illicit pleasures could seem legitimised by the elaborate didactic charms and religious glosses that loaded the text”
Single features of novel not new but “heady combination was revolutionary”
Pamela - general quotes
Endings vary - “your dutiful daughter”/”your sad-hearted Pamela”
Parental advice: “resolve to lose your life sooner than your virtue” (refuse to spend money until they know it is honest)
Mrs Jervis - “take her counsel on everything”
Rapacious Mr B “I will make a gentle woman of you, if you will be obliging”
“He by force kissed my neck and lips”
Fears that the lecherous Mrs Jewkes is an atheist
Henry Fielding - about
D. 1754.
Dramatist, novelist, magistrate. Allegedly his work prompted the 1737 Licensing Act… scriblerian with Pope and swift.
Fielding key works
Shamela (1741) and tom jones (1749)
Shamela - about
- Satirical attack on Richardson’s Pamela.
Shamela - critics
Keymer - Fielding = richardsons sharpest satirist. Shamela = “farcical, high speed burlesque of the heroines narrative” in which Pamela becomes a “bogus paragon”
Contemporary verse: “but now the idol we more adore,/jervice a bawd, and our Chaste nymph a ___”
Attacks the “poverty of a notion of virtue that fails to go beyond obsessive chastity and justification by faith”
Suggests that Pamela “anticipated its own parody” in lines by Mr B
Shamela - quotes
“An apology for the life of mrs Shamela Andrews. In which the many notorious falsehoods and misrepresentations of a book called Pamela are exposed and refuted”
Letters providing paratext of clerics to validate claims.
Mother: Henrietta Maria Honora Andrews
“When I advised you not to be guilty of folly, I meant no more than that you should take care to be well paid beforehand”
Mocking L “why how now saucy chops, boldface, says he”
Mrs jervis corrupt - bedroom door “now tonight I will take care it shall be so” (open)
Mode: “you see I write in the present tense”
Pardon Williams is corrupt: sermon teaches “that those people who talk of vartue and morality are the wickedest of all persons”
Squire Booby
Wedding night “the most difficult thing for me was to blush” “it would be hard indeed that a woman who marries a man only for his money should be debarred from spending it”
Parson: “you have two husbands cons the object of your love, and the other the object of your necessity”
Tom jones - about
1749, novel, set in the 45 rebellion. Picaresque.
Tom jones - key themes
Conscious Art of writing - interventionist narrator. city/country, true love vs lust, parenthood, incest!, class, conceptions of masculinity, nature vs hypocrisy, travelling, binary between right and wrong.
Tom jones - critics
Booth - narrator is one of the novels main characters, made obvious by his “literary style”
Campbell - Fielding makes readers aware of the medium
Tom jones - writing/theatre quotes
“The whole, to contrive the same metaphor, consists in the cookery of the author”
“I am, in reality, the founder of a new province or writing, so I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein”
Introduction of Sophia: “our tragick poets, who seldom fail to prepare their audience for the reception of their principle characters” “chapter II, a short hint of what we can do in the sublime” to describe Sophia.
Journey analogy: “we are now, reader, arrived at the last stage of our long journey” (irony because it goes on for some time after)
Men/women “those strange monsters in lace and embroidery… which, under the names of lords and ladies, strut the stage”
Tom jones key characters
Squire allworthy Tom jones (adopted, then nephew) Blifil (nephew, evil) Sophia western (jones love) Molly seagrim (lover), also Mrs Waters Squire western - colloquial "odrabbit it" Squayre and Thwackum - tutors
Tom Jones - Mock Heroic quotes
Ladies at church attacking Molly - mock heroic - “chiefly envy, the sister of Satan, and his constant companion crushed among the crowd” (in borrowed dress)
Mock heroic - waters seducing jones - “two lovely blue eyes… flew forth two pointed ogles; but… hit only a vast piece of beef”
Tom Jones - art/nature quotes
“Whatever mental accomplishments she had derived from nature, they were somewhat improved and cultivated by art”
Blifil, freeing Sophia’s bird from tom: “it seemed against the law of nature, by which everything has the right to liberty”
Tom Jones - ‘other’ quotes
Child’s hand “out-pleaded the eloquence of mrs Deborah”
MORALS - Tom/molly seagrim - “to debauch a young woman, however low her condition was, appeared to him a very heinous crime”
Pamela - clothes quotes
New clothes “rich and fine silks, and too rich and too good for me, to be sure”
Back to a “poor honest dress” of “grey russet”
Pamela - “I have been in disguise ever since” she was given mistresses old clothes.
Pamela - literature quotes
Mr B - subjectivity of letters: “she is a mighty letter-writer!… In which she makes herself an angel of light”
“Well, my story, surely, would furnish out a surprising kind of novel, if it were to be well told”
