English Literature Notes
The Enlightenment (C2)
Influential movement of the 18th century emphasizing a new understanding of the human being's place in the world.
Disseminated ideas that:
Reason is key; miracles can't be explained through faith, only through reason.
Sought to sustain/promote individual freedom and increase religious tolerance.
Engaged in public discourse.
Emphasized public education.
Reason seen in history, language, and political economy.
Sought to be seen as consumers (citizens) and arbiters of eclectic beliefs.
Criticized dogmatic thought and encouraged discussion and connection.
Artists gained a new status as arbiters of taste in public opinion.
New venues for socialization were created.
Humans sought to gain freedom of thought and engage in confronting those thoughts in public.
Aimed at liberating humans from false beliefs.
Theorizing the novel (C3, C4)
Novels were called ‘romances’; ‘memoirs’; ‘adventures’.
New narrative form brought to light by the middle class.
Defined by realistic fictions and familiar characters in familiar circumstances.
Elements include:
Detailing reality, integrating reality, intensifying reality, justifying characters, giving plausible explanations, engaging the passions of everyday sensibilities, being written for the young and ignorant to satisfy their minds, having a social utility.
Characters are always rational (thinking, talking, and acting like the lower classes)
Implies characters of inferior ranks unlike romances.
Views and criticisms of the novel are in the reader’s sphere of action.
The word 'Novel' signifies something new.
Novelistic Flexibility [form] Middle-Class Battles [narrative]
Development of new forms of activity is registered.
Hybridity connects with the social and political possibilities.
Forms and Narratives appear in theorizing the novel:
Hierarchy establishes the hero of the novel:
Superior in kinship to both men and the environment: hero is a divine being/God (myth).
Superior in degree to other men and to the environment: hero is a human being who possesses fantastic abilities (romance).
Superior in degree to other men, but NOT to his environment: hero is a leader (epic, tragedy).
Middle Mimetic Mode:
Superior neither to other men nor to his environment: hero is one of us (comedy, realistic fiction).
Low Mimetic Mode:
Inferior in power or intellect: hero is ironic.
Novelization expresses a process of generic re-structuring.
Ian Watt [narrative]
Language used is regarded as didactic.
The co-existence in the consciousness of the artists.
Form of the novel way to be by Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding.
Novel rose after the instance in reality in the 18th century.
Sees an unprecedented value on particularity or originality.
Deals with details of daily life and confronts the actual experiences of individuals.
Offers narrative designs of time, space, and materiality.
Theory of Formal Realism.
Realism is a defining characteristic of the novel.
The use of Realism is the moral or formal feature of the novel.
Portrays all the varieties of human experience.
Formal realism becomes a point at which truth can be divined by the individual.
Narratives represent desires of daily life and confront the actual experience of individuals -> a narrative method that emphasizes a comprehensive vision of life.
Middle Mimetic [narrative]
Deals with causality, the individual becomes relatively free from determining higher sources, political and religious roles.
Novel reflects the individual and intentional relation to others.
Novel's principle character is true to individual experience => individual experience is always unique and therefore new.
Robinson Crusoe shows a concern on individualism and the rise of the novel.
Emotional ties and personal relations help define the individual.
Genre of the novel is a tentative dependent to enter empirical moral and social ethics.
Establishes a narrative of national possibility. Novels offered an empirical social imaginary for middle-class individualism to national citizenship to express themselves.
J. Paul Hunter [narrative]
Stresses the significance of social categorizing and relating that to the economic, political, and cultural fields.
'Sites of Novel' about a relation paradigm.
Relational characters with behavior similar to those in the real world.
Readers identified with the characters, characters have a heightened awareness in thoughts and feelings. Gives readers what it would feel to be them.
Freedom of discourse, it is dependent on the future of money.
Types of Novels (C5)
Adventure Novel:
Has an epic structure with mini-narratives, a crisis, and a resolution.
The narrator is familiar.
Events are mostly external.
Has a linear plot which narrates adventures of the same character.
Robinson Crusoe:
Alternates with 1st person narrative and has an immediate relation.
Is a fictitious autobiography
A parody of other popular genres.
Narrates the adventure of an outcast who is lost but goes on to achieve reconciliation and wealth in the end.
Often offers an insight on pain and self-experience.
The direction is ironic.
Contains social realism, which narrates the miseries of the story and offers a realistic account of low life with social satire.
Novel of Development
Follows the life of a single character.
Has a large scale of characters or situations.
Has a particular reality.
Has a happy ending.
Contains mini-stories.
Concentrates awareness of life in characters to be an individual and construct identity.
Sentimental Novel:
Represents mental and emotional processes and perceptions of the subject of point.
Has an implausible plot
The characters lack psychological complexity.
The ethics are largely familiar.
Gothic Novel
Blends the ancient and the modern.
Sublimes effects are combined with the supernatural and the characters’ reactions.
Contains the supernatural with the psychological behavior.
The atmosphere is one of terror and uncertainty. Psychological and self-tension.
The characters enjoy marriage.
It is connected to sentimental fiction:
Carries visions of ideal political possibilities and how social solidarity would happen.
Picaresque Novel
Pilgrim's Progress:
Contains a complex perspective and expresses human feelings and depicts social circles in a combination of behavior and engaging the reader to imagine.
The vanity fair represents the idea that a man will have to face all kinds of temptations on his way to salvation.
Christian goes on to achieving enlightenment, with me going through hardships.
The Unfortunate Happy Lady: A True History of the Nun –Aphra Behn (C7)
Women start to make a living out of writing.
Aphra Behn is one of the first women to ever write to sustain herself.
The romance was considered a masculine genre while the novel was considered feminine.
Realism of the character gains importance.
The title is an oxymoron.
Phillis finds it likely to not know men and is considered by men in her life until she meets the farther women and changes her perspective.
Phillis becomes a symbol of the superiority of the woman where the women are always flawed, placing women in a better position.
Turkish Emissary Letters- It holds detailed accounts of domestic and familial scenes as well as sustains a central critique that challenges Orientalist assumptions