Studies in the Novel articles from June 1998

Studies in the Novel archives from June 1998

Old issues and new.(Making Genre: Studies in the Novel or Something Like It, 1684-1762)
June 22, 1998... In the introduction to his 1987 special issue of Studies in the Novel entitled "Women and Early Fiction," Jerry Beasley declared that the time for thoughtful analysis of his subject had "beyond all doubt arrived." He continued: Still in...

"Hieroglifick'd" history in Aphra Behn's "Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister."(Making Genre: Studies in the Novel or Something Like It, 1684-1762)
June 22, 1998... Though vigorously challenged by Margaret Anne Doody in The True Story of the Novel, the guiding assumption of recent studies of eighteenth-century English fiction has been that specific historical conditions contributed to the rise of a genre...

The anomalous fiction of Mary Hearne. (English novelist)(Making Genre: Studies in the Novel or Something Like It, 1684-1762)
June 22, 1998... Mary Hearne's only two novels are anomalies within both the scandalous and didactic traditions of early eighteenth-century fiction by women writers. At first glance, The Lovers Week (1718) and The Female Deserters (1719) have highly subversive...

All aboard the ark of possibility; or Robinson Crusoe returns from Mars as a small-footprint, multi-channel indeterminacy machine. (fictional character of English novelist Daniel Defoe)(Making Genre: Studies in the Novel or Something Like It, 1684-1762)
June 22, 1998... In the thirty-two years between the presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe generated two characterizations, one comic-parodic and one serious-academic: first, that of the rollicking and faintly...

Novel streets: the rebuilding of London and Defoe's 'A Journal of the Plague Year.' (English novelist Daniel Defoe)(Making Genre: Studies in the Novel or Something Like It, 1684-1762)
June 22, 1998... As the Fire the succeeding Year, spread itself and burnt with such Violence, that the Citizens in Despair, gave over their Endeavours to extinguish it, so in the Plague, it came at last to such Violence that the People sat...

Spying upon the conjurer: Haywood, curiosity, and "the novel" in the 1720s. (English novelist Eliza Haywood)(Making Genre: Studies in the Novel or Something Like It, 1684-1762)
June 22, 1998... Dorothy George's mordant observation that no work was unfit for women in eighteenth-century London so long as it was sufficiently dirty, disagreeable, and ill-paid might be applied with some justice to the work of the early women novelists in...

The curious genre: female inquiry in amatory fiction.(Making Genre: Studies in the Novel or Something Like It, 1684-1762)
June 22, 1998... Curiosity, particularly sexual curiosity, is an impulse traditionally attributed to women. From Pandora's peeking and Eve's eating to Alice's anxiety in Wonderland, female curiosity in religion, myth, popular culture, and high literature has...

Narrative authority, critical complicity: the case of 'Jonathan Wild.' (novel by Henry Fielding)(Making Genre: Studies in the Novel or Something Like It, 1684-1762)
June 22, 1998... The twentieth-century critical reception of Henry Fielding's The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great has been largely dismissive. As John D. Baird writes: Jonathan Wild is a difficult book. Those who warm to...

Reading at arm's length: Fielding's contract with the reader in 'Tom Jones.' (novel by English writer Henry Fielding)(Making Genre: Studies in the Novel or Something Like It, 1684-1762)
June 22, 1998... Academic readers of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) have sensed in what John Richetti calls "its sustaining network of ironies" the hand of a self-assured author, directing readers through hermeneutic cruxes to an appreciation of the...

Authorship and generic exploitation: why Lovelace must fear 'Clarissa.' (novel by English writer Samuel Richardson)(Making Genre: Studies in the Novel or Something Like It, 1684-1762)
June 22, 1998... Sir, I passed two hours this morning with Mr. Cibber, whom I found in such real anxiety for Clarissa.... I had related to him, not only the catastrophe of the story, but also your truly religious and moral reason for...

Prefiguring genre: frontispiece portraits from 'Gulliver's Travels' to 'Millenium Hall.' (English novels)(Making Genre: Studies in the Novel or Something Like It, 1684-1762)
June 22, 1998... During the early decades of the genre's formation, English novels' material embodiments as printed books rivaled their narrative contents in diversity and creativity. This parallel between formal and stylistic rambunctiousness is unsurprising:...

Little by little; or, the history of the early novel, now.(Making Genre: Studies in the Novel or Something Like It, 1684-1762)
June 22, 1998... One of the most important and vexing questions currently facing students of the British novel is the very simple one of how to tell the story of its gradual emergence as the dominant modern form of literary expression in the English-speaking...