Eighteenth-Century Periodicals and the Romantic Rise of the Novel
1994; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-1512
Autores Tópico(s)Literature: history, themes, analysis
ResumoAs They Are; or, The of Caleb Williams --Title of a novel, 1794 Real life can always be dismissed, it seems; fiction has to be dealt with. --Review of film Menace II Society, 1993(1) Haunting our efforts to understand of novel is one of stranger twists of literary history: moment novel actually did rise--rise literally in quantitative terms--is moment that we have paid it relatively little attention. The problem is not an inability to count, a failure to connect genre to history, but rather power of connections that already do count. Our associations are firmly fixed: once we rise novelistically past Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne, and 1780s and 1790s come into view, critical attention shifts to supposedly lyrical advent of Romanticism. But those were precisely decades when novel took off, with publication reaching. in James Raven's words, unprecedented levels in late 1780s.(2) Growth until that point in century had been slow and erratic. From an annual rate of only about four to twenty new titles through first four decades, and remaining--despite Fielding's and Richardson's popularity--within a range of roughly twenty to forty for next three, new novel production peaked briefly near sixty in 1770 before a steep decline to well below forty during latter half of that decade. Within next seven years, however, output jumped--more than doubled--to close to ninety, and continued to increase sharply into next century. That rise was not, of course, against grain; Raven's figures clearly show a parallel surge in overall ESTC publication totals. need not look far for possible causes; population was following a similar curve, and, following Raven, we can add: expansion of country distribution network, increased institutional demand, and new productivity based on financial and organizational innovation (p. 35). The question is not, then, how novel bucked solely initiated a trend, but how it joined and furthered it--how it participated, that is, in what Raymond Williams has called the naturaliz[ation] of writing. For Williams, history of writing has spanned last two hundred years, from moment that modern configuration of writing, print, and silent reading first became natural, to new cultural period we have ... entered in late twentieth century in which print and silent reading are again only one of several cultural forms, only one even of forms of writing.' The quotations that head this essay bracket that history, calling attention to this scenario of change as a matter of continuity and discontinuity. What is continuous is power of or in Godwin's title: how As They Are can almost silently give way to fictitious Adventures of an individual character. What both fascinated and puzzled even hostile contemporary reviewers was Godwin's presentation of that individuality: We are somewhat at a loss how to introduce our readers to an acquaintance with this singular narrative. Of it presents little, of character and situation much. The quantitative rise of characters who convey strong feeling arising from author's depth of reflection on ... society(4) signals proliferation and valorization of fiction, and of novel-of-character as an effective form for it. Things are still becoming fiction today in works like Menace H Society, which, as reviewer points out, also subordinates incident to feeling: You can only absorb its emotional content. The story is relatively simple, to point of being nonexistent. What is discontinuous, of course, is form--film rather than novel--but even that discontinuity evokes other continuities. Just as Godwin's novel is not only writing, but a thematizing of it--in particular, writing's efficacy in producing and sustaining a character worth vindicating(5)--so this movie offers itself up as stuff of character: although characters in this startling debut by 21-year-old twin brothers Allen and Albert Hughes may be sociopathic, reports reviewer, truly disturbing thing is, so is movie. …
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