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