Difference between revisions of "2008 MM Origins of the Novel 1473-1700"

Revision as of 21:38, 22 January 2008

The modern novel is still generally seen as a production beginning in the period around 1700 – if Defoe was not its father Aphra Behn, a generation earlier had to be its mother. Traditionally a production of “romances” was believed to have preceded the novel – French baroque romances the expert on English literature could dare to ignore.

The seminar will step into the territory before the 1700 and look at the various beginnings offered here in the form of shorter prose stories (“novels” in the original sense of the word), of “romances”, of more or less fictitious diaries and histories, of works of taste and of “low” entertainments.

A body of six texts will be discussed in group, individual research should use the debate to branch out into individual fields of interest from here.

Texts

Literature

• Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel. Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (London, 1957).
• Richetti, John J., Popular Fiction before Richardson. Narrative Patterns 1700-1739 (Oxford, 1969).
• Spufford, Magaret, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (London, 1981).
• Davis, Lennard J., Factual Fictions. The Origins of the English Novel (New York, 1983).
• McKeon, Michael, "Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel," Cultural Critique, 1 (1985). [repr. in Damrosch, Leopold Jr., Modern Essays on Eighteenth Century Literature (New York/ Oxford, 1988), p.159-81.
• Spencer, Jane, The Rise of Woman Novelists. From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford, 1986).
• Spender, Dale, Mothers of the Novel. 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen (London/ New York, 1986).
• McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
• Todd, Janet, The Sign of Angellica. Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660-1800 (London, 1989).
• Hunter, Paul J., Before Novels. The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (New York/ London, 1990).
• Relihan, Constance Caroline, Fashioning authority: the development of Elizabethan novelistic discourse (Kent, Ohio/ London: Kent State University Press, 1994). ISBN 0873384954
• Watt, Tessa, Cheap print and popular piety: 1550-1640 [=Cambridge studies in early modern British history] (Cambridge: 1994). ISBN 0-521-45827-7, ISBN 0-521-38255-6
• Doody, Margaret Anne, The true story of the novel (London: Fontana Press, 1996). ISBN 0-00-686379-5
• Relihan, Constance C. (ed.), Framing Elizabethan fictions: contemporary approaches to early modern narrative prose (Kent, Ohio/ London: Kent State University Press, 1996). ISBN 0873385519
• Reconsidering The Rise of the Novel - Eighteenth Century Fiction, Volume 12, Number 2-3, ed. David Blewett (January-April 2000). ASIN: B000MV7YGA Amazon
• Michael McKeon, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
• Simons, Olaf, Marteaus Europa, oder, Der Roman, bevor er Literatur wurde (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001).
• Relihan, Constance C./ Goran V. Stanivukovic (eds.), Prose fiction and early modern sexuality in England, 1570-1640 (New York/ Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). ISBN 1403963886
• Mentz, Steve, Romance for sale in early modern England: the rise of prose fiction (Aldershot [etc.]: Ashgate, 2006). ISBN 0-7546-5469-9
• Raymond, Joad, Pamphlets and pamphleteering in early modern Britain [=Cambridge studies in early modern British history] (Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006). ISBN 0-521-02877-9