john bunyan: the progress - unideb.huieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_10533.pdfi am this month one whole...

John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678-

84)

the journey of Christian: the human soul in search of salvation

places: Slough of Despondency, Vanity Fair, Celestial City

characters: Faithful, Obstinate, Pliable, MrWorldly-Wiseman, Mr Facing-Both-Ways

allegorical framework - realistic detail

Christian could

not rise until

Faithful came to

help him

Christian dragged

out of the Slough of

Despond by Help

(William Blake)

critical purpose (attack)comic devices (laughter)moral standard grotesque, absurd exaggeration, fantastic

worldsCyrano de Bergerac: Journey to the Moon Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (1726)Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Houynhnms and

Yahoos Increasingly difficult to find a place from

which to laugh

(conte philosophique)

Fénelon: Telemachus (1699)

Voltaire: Candide (1759)

Dr (Samuel) Johnson: Rasselas, Prince of

Abissinia (1759)

Bessenyei György: Tariménes utazása

(1804)

the pícaro; episodic structure

Diego Hurtado de Mendoza: Lazarillo de

Tormes (1554)

Thomas Nashe: The Unfortunate Traveller

(1594)

Cervantes: Don Quijote (1605, 1615)

Lesage: Gil Blas (1715-35)

Romances:

Aphra Behn: Oroonoko or The Royal Slave

(1688)

journalism (news ballads)

1700-1740: 7 new novels per year

By 1770: 40 new novels per year

publishers (booksellers)

writer as entrepreneur (end of feudal

patronage)

hack writers (Grub street)

Novel: the genre of modernity

(novel – newspaper)

new readership: the bourgeoisie

(women)

middle class ideologies

novel vs. epic, romance (chivalric,

pastoral)

Epic: heroic past, supernatural elements,

strict formal conventions

Romance: aristocratic (medieval, feudal)

milieu, unrealistic; exotic, magical

elements

Realist (concerned with this world, now) Individualist (prefers the particular to the general)

New treatment of: space time character plot style structure

(1)Treatment of space:

actual, real spaces and places

careful description of everyday objects

and spaces

familiar spaces; domestic space

(2)Treatment of time

Specific ‘calendar time’

(Clarissa dies at 6.40, Thursday, 7 Sept)

Fielding consulted an almanac

‘slowness’ of narration

letters, journals, diaries – the everyday is

interesting

(3)Treatment of character:

ordinary people

new kinds of names: Pamela Andrews,

Moll Flanders, Tom Jones

first-person narrators: new intimacy with

the reader

(4)Treatment of plot

no mythology

plausibility (no improbable events)

Events follow from characters’ features

and desires

(5) style and language in the novel:

no restrictions (no decorum)

style is not crucial:

free, flaexible, ordinary language

(6) Structure and tradition

absence of formal conventions

no classical models

„the most independent, most elastic… of

literary forms” (Henry James)

18th century: low prestige of the novel

(Charlotte Lennox: The Female Quijote)

Mikhail Bakhtin: „The novel parodies other

genres, it exposes the conventionality of these

forms and their language”

Incorporating other genres and texts

Tobias Smollett: picaresque (Roderick

Random; Humphry Clinker)

Defoe: (spiritual) autobiography, allegory

Samuel Richardson: epistolary, domestic,

novel of sensibility (Pamela, Clarissa)

Fielding: novel as prose mock-epic (Tom

Jones; Joseph Andrews)

Sterne: parody (Tristram Shandy)

Fanny Burney (Evelina, 1778);

Sarah Fielding (The Adventures of David Simple)

Oliver Goldsmith (The Vicar of Wakefield, 1766)

Eliza Haywood (Love in Excess, 1717)

Charlotte Lennox (The Female Quijote, 1752)

Henry Mackenzie (The Man of Feeling, 1771)

Presented as ‘fact’

Puritan background: reading for pleasure

is forbidden

moral self-improvement is the only

reason for reading

Realist autobiography

RC tries to transform it into spiritual,

religious allegory:

Sin, punishment, repentance, deliverance

Robinson’s ‘original sin’: ‘not being

satisfy’d with the station wherein God and

nature has placed him’

his wisdom: ‘blessed with confined

desires’

religious allegory – allegory of capitalism

Constant book-keeping

Contractual relationships

Colonial allegory (Friday)

Compiling model letters („From a Maid-Servant

in Town, acquainting her Father and Mother in

the Country with a Proposal of Marriage, and

asking their Consent”)

aim: ‘how to think and act justly and prudently in

the common Concerns of Human Life”. „to

teach Morality, parental, filial, and social duties,

to paint VICE in its proper colours, to set VIRTUE

in its own amiable light’

(Puritan conduct-books)

Pamela Andrews and Mr. B. (the libertarian

rake)

The struggle for Pamela’s body

Symbolic rape: Pamela gives up her diary

from her petticoat

Middle-class virtue – corrupt aristocracy

parodied by Henry Fielding: Shamela

Fielding: Joseph Andrews (Pamela’s

‘brother’)

epistolary novel (more than 500 letters)

Clarissa Harlowe

Roger Solmes: the convenient match

Richard Lovelace: the exciting, brilliant

and dangerous rake

truly ordinary individual in the centre

(ordinary virtue ‘glorified’)

domestic, private affairs, everyday

activities

‘Much more lively and affecting must be the

style of those who write in the height of a

present distress; the mind tortured by the

pangs of uncertainty (the events then

hidden in the womb of fate); than the dry,

narrative, unanimated style of a person

relating difficulties and dangers

surmounted, can be’ (Richardson: Preface

to Clarissa)

external action –internal action(psychology)

intimacy with the reader

virtue (cult) of sensibilitiy, sensitivity(new type of – modern - man)

Domestic fiction, novel of manners, psychological fiction, secretary novels

The novel as mock-epic

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

(1749)

Paradise Hall (Squire Allworthy); Master

Blifil; Sophia Western, Molly Seagram;

Lady Bellaston

Tom’s ‘life is a constant struggle between

honour and inclination, which alternately

triumphed on each other’

Broad canvas, huge cast

Structural symmetries

Essayistic, self-reflexive bits

Mock-epic features

Tom and Molly – Aeneas and Dido

The epic battle: Molly attacked by

villagers

anti-novel or ‘the most typical novel of

the world’ (Viktor Shklovsky)

TS trying to tell his life: impossible

(1) conscientiousness (where to begin?)

(2) ‘life’ vs ‘opinions’ : he cannot get to the

‘life’ because of the ‘opinions’

Also: ‘life’ always defies ‘opinions’

Hobby-horses

Walter Shandy, Uncle Toby, CorporalTrim, Dr. Slop

digression, interruption, recursivity: governed by associations of ideas

self-reflection, metafiction (postmodernnovel)

parody of other styles and genres

‘I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelvemonth; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volumeand no further than to my first day’s life’tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at iton the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes backwas every day of my life to be as busy a day as thisAnd why not?and the transactions and opinions of it to take up as much descriptionAnd for what reason should they be cut short? as at this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should writeI must follow, an’please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to writeand consequently, the more your worships read, the more your worships will have to read.

Will this be good for your worships eyes?’