You will learn about how?novel?developed as a new literary genre in the 18th?century and rose to its maturity and great period in the 19th?century. You can learn about great novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, etc.

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來自 <https://www.icourse163.org/learn/GDUFS-1459759161?tid=1463241452#/learn/announce>

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Content

◎6.1 From Prose Fiction to Fiction

◎6.2 Novelistic Fiction

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◎6.1 From Prose Fiction to Fiction

Novel: an art form; a genre rather than a period

Why novels became popular in England and elsewhere

1.? Greater literacy in 18th and 19th century England.

Famous poets like John Milton, John Dryden and Alexander Pope, their poems are quite demanding to read and understand.

Highly educated class in wealthy families are still enthusiastic about poetry, a highly polished art form.

2.? Puritans suppressed and closed the theaters in the civil war period(the Commonwealth Interregnum).

A lingering feeling : certain aspects of theater appeal to the baser human instincts.

And a play begins and ends in a very tight time-frame.

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Hence, there is room for a new innovation.

3.? In the early 18th century, people wished for a form of entertainment that could keep them occupied for a longer time, and furthermore one that they could enjoy at home.

The novel is essentially a book that fits these requirements very nicely.

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The best-seller: Robinson Crusoe(by Daniel Defoe)

·?????? The story is engaging. It is about an Englishman shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, providing many 18th-century readers with many hours of enjoyment. The details of Robinson Crusoe's adventure are entirely a work of imagination. The story is so entertaining and the readers to this day are immediately attracted to the story content.

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·?????? In the 18th century, the people of England along with those of all the other countries of Europe had been intrigued for some time by the New World. Defoe tells us in the novel that Crusoe was shipwrecked on an island off the coast of South America. And in 1719, this was a place where very few people would ever go.

·?????? Robinson Crusoe's story is mainly about survival in a place where he is all alone. Readers are inclined to experience the dramatic story all in their imagination in the comfort of their home.(intellectually involved in exploration but not necessarily involved physically in the actual difficult voyages)

The influential European men are surrounded with globes and maps. But they are not in the dangerous wilds of South America. Instead, they are in a comfortable house somewhere in Europe.

The globes and maps are just commodities collected to represent/ showcase their position in a world that is expanding itself to include a New World.

·?????? The story of Robinson Crusoe allows readers to collect the commodities of exploration, not as an object to admire on a shelf, but as a quantity of knowledge in his or her head.

·?????? Robinson was salvaged from the shipwreck. As Defoe explains in significant detail, Robinson is by no means a human being stranded with none of none of the modern commodities that make life easier.

·?????? The Value of Commodities of Modern Civilization:

Insights from Capital by Karl Marx

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·?????? Robinson Crusoe has a lot to give. Critics deny that Robinson Crusoe is Britain's first novel for it is not really a novel.

·?????? In sum, detractors argue that Robinson Crusoe may be an interesting adventure, but the book nonetheless does very little to expand the readers' view of the human condition. The critics who deny Robinson Crusoe as the first English novel often cite Pamela.

·?????? Pamela is different as night and day from Robinson Crusoe. For one thing, the entire story is told in the form of letters sent back and forth between the characters. So the readers have the experience of looking over the shoulder of letter-writers. This is called Epistolary Novel.(epistle→letter)

·?????? Pamela(or Virtue Rewarded) is the story of a servant girl named Pamela Andrews who works for a rich British gentleman who is identified in the novel only as Mr. B. Most of the story involves the fact that Mr. B would like certain favors from Pamela in addition to her housecleaning. After various adventures in and around Mr. B's summer estate, Pamela is eventually convinced that Mr. B will sincerely enter into a legitimate marriage with her and then becomes Mrs. B.

https://book.douban.com/subject/3232499/

·?????? According to the title Virtue Rewarded, her virtue is that she resisted the advances of Mr. B, and her reward is that she married a rich and powerful guy and therefore improved her status in the world.

·?????? Both Pamela and Robinson Crusoe were compelling reading, which demonstrated that the novel as an art form defined its place in the literary pantheon from the very beginning.

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◎6.2 Novelistic Fiction

·?????? In the 19th century, Jane Austen a female novelist that is enormously important. And probably no novelist shines more brightly than Jane Austen.

·?????? She was born into a middle class family when social position at birth was very important in those days.

·?????? She was not a member of the peerage that is the daughter of a high-ranking person with a heredity title, such as duke, marquis, earl, viscount and baron nor was she royalty.

·?????? Her father attended Oxford, then and now one of the premier academic institutions in the world. This undoubtedly contributed to the intellectual environment in which Jane was raised.

·?????? Austen's early life: As the English gentry's comfortable life in the English countryside is the setting of Austen's novels.

·?????? In none of her novels, there are members of peerage, at least as major characters, and certainly no members of the royalty.

·?????? In a very distinct way, Austen was writing about what she knew.

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?Persuasion(Austen's novel)

·?????? The story is about a 26-year-old girl Anne Elliott, the daughter of a baronet. Her father Sir Walter got his wealth the old-fashioned way by inheriting from his father. However, he was a bit foolish and has gotten himself into financial trouble. He can no longer keep his family living the high life in the ancestral property Kellynch Hall.

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·?????? Historical Context: the baronet's ancestors has been given a generous portion of land, often for some service or other to the king many centuries earlier. And they can simply rent the land and live on the rental income.? Baronet is an inherited title that usually came with a certain amount of property that got passed on to the oldest son. But the baronet was not considered a member of peerage.

·?????? Sir Walter does nothing for a living, after he gained the heredity title. He has the problem that his rental income is insufficient to live the life he enjoys being accustomed. So he decided to take his family to Bath, a resort town in the south of England where they will live an interesting and privileged life with less expenses. In the meantime, he will rent Kellynch Hall to Admiral Croft.

·?????? The action of the novel is set first at Kellynch Hall and then at Bath, and primarily concerns the romances between Anne Elliott and Frederick Wentworth, another Navy man whom she had rejected for marriage seven years earlier, because he was only a lowly naval officer. However, she realizes that she may have jilted Wentworth on bad advice of a family friend. And when he comes back to her life, he's the younger brother of Admiral Croft's wife. They began patching up their misunderstandings and at the end of the novel they decided to get married.

·?????? Captain Wentworth achieves the upward mobility: He has accomplished the feat in exactly the same way as his brother-in-law Admiral Croft who is even richer.

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·?????? Historical Context: In those days, high-ranking officer in the Navy who captured enemy ships got a huge portion of the value of the ship and its cargo, and this included both ships of the foreign navy as well as commercial vessels. This is called Prize Money.

·?????? There was even a government office called the Admiralty Prize Court that determined how the money would be distributed. Therefore, a sea captain in the British Navy like Frederick Wentworth could do pretty well for himself by capturing a ship or two and his admiral who commanded a fleet of ships could do even better.

·?????? As the Navy captain is derided for their rapid rise in society by a gentleman who inherited his wealth. We very naturally look to the broader social context to explain the workings of the novel. Since Anne Elliott is daughter of a baronet, a normal option for her might be to marry some young man of similar position. She elects to marry a guy who is upwardly mobile. So the world of Anne Elliott may be constrained but the novel provided us with an interesting dynamic in which we may observe British society in a state of flux.

The period of the Napoleonic Wars was a time in which Britain felt somewhat vulnerable despite the country's longstanding prowess on the high seas. Austen constructs a novel that captures this dynamic flux in a very original way. As we may see, the Napoleonic Wars are the deep background of the social circumstances that we encounter in Persuasion.

?Mansfield Park (Austen's novel)

The story concerns a girl named Fanny Price the niece by marriage of a baronet names Sir Thomas Bertram. Thus, she has far more limited prospects than Anne Elliott in finding a suitable husband who can provide her with a comfortable life. But she finds one all the same.

But the point here is Sir Thomas Bertram gets part of his family income from a slave property that he has somehow acquired on the Caribbean island of Antigua. But there is very limited mention of the issue of slavery in Antigua and even less of Sir Thomas Bertram's direct involvement in the slave trade.

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?In her novels, Austen portrays a domestic drama that integrates very well in contemporary British society as it was evolving in the early nineteenth century.

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