ENEC 8600 Eighteenth Century Prose Fiction: Space, Time, and Prepositions in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

200-315 MW - Contact Prof. Wall
Instructor: Cynthia Wall

Other than that they are (mostly) long to very long prose fiction narratives, eighteenth-century British novels have little in common, formally speaking. From the dreamlike (or nightmarish) landscape that is Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, through Haywood’s shrewd amatory fiction, Defoe’s circling first-person narratives, the suffocating epistolarity of Richardson (that’s a compliment, btw), the self-reflexive irony of Fielding, the pleasures of digression in Sterne, the agonies of sensibility in Burney, the psychological labyrinths of gothic, and the innovative interiorities of Austen, each new instance defines and patterns itself anew, and none bears much similarity to the nineteenth-century inheritors. We will look at a variety of historical and cultural contexts, such as changes in architecture, typography, and grammar, and the ways they map onto changes in literary perceptions of space, time, motion, things, narrative, and, yes, even prepositions.