2008 MM Origins of the Novel 1473-1700

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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 early novel – French baroque romances the expert on English literature could dare to ignore.

The seminar will step into the territory before 1700 and look at the various beginnings offered here be it in the form of shorter prose stories (“novels” in the original sense of the word), of “romances”, or 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.


Get your share of the national license so that you can access

  • EEBO — book production 1473-1700
  • ECCO — the book production of the 18th century
  • more links at Links


• 09.04.2008

Course outline

• 16.04.2008: Thie rise of the novel

Work to be done: Read either of Manley's Novels 3 and 4 (personal preference) and compare them with the respective parallel novel in Painter (Nos. 42-43). Direct links to pdf files on the institute's server: Painter [1] - Manley [2]

• 23.04.2008: The market of novels

Where do we find the word, what does it signify? How does it relate to the novella?

Tasks

  • search The ESTC for the term novel, create an overview of the quantitative production. We can split this and look at centuries or half centuries and put the results together in joint work.
  • take a look at Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel and get a gist of the argument. What does he say about the early market?

Fabian tried to access EEBO without a national license access code - which he could not outside the university web. We decided that I would give a link to a novel of my choice:

  • The English monsieur a comical novel : wherein his travells, amours, and other passages of his life no less strange than delightful, are faithfully set down by an impartial hand : in four parts. London: Printed for William Cademan ..., 1679. EEBO Anglistik Server Oldenburg

I choose it because it had a French touch and an English topic. You may read this as your preparation or any other novel you rather want to read and find in EEBO. Note: Your title has to bear the word "novel" oder "novela" or "nouvelle" (etc.) on the title page - and I will appreciate a short statement on what made you choose your novel out of the many. --Olaf Simons 20:09, 21 April 2008 (CEST)

--> I (Fabian) have made a choice; if you would like to read two texts or if you would like to read mine rather than the other, please look up the following novel at EEBO:
  • Aphra Behn: "The unfortunate bride, or, The Blind lady a beauty", 1700

That's the following EEBO-Link --Olaf Simons 20:14, 21 April 2008 (CEST)

• 30.04.2008: Novels vs. Romances

We shifted the schedule to delay the Rogue stories - so a third session on "novels".

Tasks

  • Compare Ian Watt on the Rise of the Novel with the preface to The Secret History, of Queen Zarah, and the Zarazians (Albigion, 1705) - which you will find in French, English and German contemporary versions at http://www.pierre-marteau.com/editions/1683-1712-novels.html
  • Read either The English monsieur a comical novel : wherein his travells, amours, and other passages of his life no less strange than delightful, are faithfully set down by an impartial hand : in four parts. London: Printed for William Cademan ..., 1679. EEBO Anglistik Server Oldenburg
  • or read a "novel" (the word has to appear on the title page) of your choice from EEBO - and offer us a title page reproduction and a short summary.

Discussion

  • What do our novels have in common?
  • How do your observations relate to the preface of Queen Zarah and to Ian Watt's book
  • Why should short novels be better than long romances?
  • ...more questions? Ask them here.

• 7.5.2008: Rogue stories

Group: Bastian Martens, Robert Stahlschmidt, Malte Maria Unverzagt, Iris Poller

Session: Discussion of Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel - and its problems.

• 14.05.2008: Rogue stories

Reading material for this session: Rogue Stories Research Group

Those who went into the Rogue stories group will find first hints in my book p.525-28. The most important text (which cannot become a seminar reading in its entirety) is Richard Head's English Rogue (1665 ff.) See the en.wikipedia-article. More difficult to categorise are the reports on criminals which did also occasionally adopt the title of "rogue" stories. "Satirical romances" are a parallel genre - or the larger genre incorporating these stories...

Task

  • The group should do some research on the ESTC to get an impression of how many of these books were produced between 1473 and 1700
  • Each group member should choose a title of his or her interest and propose it as seminar reading. A Thesenpapier of ideas on the questions below would be welcome to feed the discussion.
  • Course work: we split the English Rogue into sections of four chapters per person (everyone remembers his or her sections?) Fill in short notes on your chapters here Richard Head, English Rogue (1665)

Seminar debate

  • What do these titles have in common? Is there a genre - or is it a mixture of crime cases and satirical romances? What does the research in our library say about these titles (see the Handapparat). In case you find secondary literature on the subject in MLA we do not have, tell me and I take care that the library buys them.

• 21.05.2008: Chap books - the market of cheap books

Group: Dorothee Keßler

Ideally you will find most of the genres in cheap editions. A list published in 1719 can be found at the end of: The Illustrious and Renown'd History of the Seven Famous Champions of Christendom (London: T. Norris/ A. Bettesworth, 1719). ECCO

Author: Smithson, Samuel. Title: The famous history of Guy Earl of Warwick Date: 1600 [3] EEBO on Campus

• 28.05.2008: Pornography - if the term is appropriate

Group: Sonja Büsing, Kendall K. Sadler, Marie-Catherine Bartels

Problem is here that the term "pornography" was not in use though we have stories we could put into the category. Some of the titles Inger Leemans listed for the Dutch market had English predecessors. I can provider Ingers dissertation - it is in Dutch. She also gave list on the web.

• 24.06.2008: Secret histories and politics

Group: Alex Storch, Jan Gaebel, Christian Ueckert.

• 11.06.2008: Secret histories and politics

• 18.06.2008: Romances - the French market

Group: Manuela Seidel , Anke Herbers, Christina Nolte

• 25.06.2008: King Arthur and the Amadis

• 02.07.2008: The history of romances

• 09.07.2008: The history of the novel

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). IBIT: bub 276.3 eng AW 8473
  • Davis, Lennard J., Factual Fictions. The Origins of the English Novel (New York, 1983). IBIT: ang 527.3 CE 7661 nicht ausgel., vorgemerkt für Handapparat 907 - who is that???
  • 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). IBIT: ang 527.5 fra BK 1326
  • McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). IBIT: ang 356 BP 8276,2002
  • Todd, Janet, The Sign of Angellica. Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660-1800 (London, 1989). IBIT: ang 356 BP 8276,2002
  • 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