Volume 71, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Alongside – The Novel: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Fiction; Guest Editor: Hanne Roth

This article provides a recapitulation of Ian Watt’s classic account of the rise of the novel in terms of the rise of the middle class which finds its ideological equivalent in the rise of formal realism. While this account has been frequently countered by revisionist approaches in a largely new historicist mode, which insist that the historical multifariousness of modern novel writing in the eighteenth century is not fully captured by Watt (Lennart J. Davis, Michael McKeon, J. Paul Hunter, Jane Spencer, Nancy Armstrong and Janet Todd in the 1980s, Marcie Frank, Jordan Alexander Stein and Mike Goode more recently), it has not really lost its persuasiveness to this day. As the article tries to show, this persuasiveness rests on the ideological implications of Watt’s account of early novelistic practice rather than its actual historical implementation. This diagnosis has recently been confirmed by Mike Goode’s approach to Sir Walter Scott’s and Jane Austen’s ‘synthesis’ of fully developed formal realism in terms of ‘media behaviors’ and their affordances. In the case of Jane Austen, for example, the fact that later media usage in fanfiction tends to turn to narrative techniques from before Austen’s synthesis (letters, journals, etc.) points to the (perceived) ideological limitations of her technical achievement of smooth assimilation of multiple points of view into a naturalized third-person narrator’s discourse. This opens up new perspectives on Smollett’s practice of unassimilated multiperspectivity, especially in his last novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771).

This article explores György Lukács’s reflections on the relationship between the eighteenth-century novel and early modern capitalism. As such, it offers a critical overview of Lukács’s treatment of this subject in two major works – The Theory of the Novel and The Historical Novel  – in the process, focusing on the evolution of his approach as a literary critic and contextualising this in relation to his wider theoretical writings. Ultimately, it seeks to demonstrate how the later Lukács’s critical approach differs from contemporary criticism dealing with the same subject, in particular concerning his engagement with the ramifications of his analysis for the present.

The article focuses on two female writers from the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century: Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen. Based on Smith’s first novel Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788) and Austen’s Emma (1815), the novel’s evolutionary trajectory from prose fiction at the end of the eighteenth century to the full flowering of the realist novel will be traced in an exemplary fashion. Thereby, the analysis will argue that Emmeline represents a case of transition in which subjective modes of storytelling (literary conventions, character perspective) have not yet been synthetically combined with the objectifying framework of the narrative situation. Finally, this has been achieved with the realist novel as will be demonstrated with Emma .

The article seeks to conceive of Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750) as a hybrid text that employs certain (formal) elements of what was to become ‘the realist novel’ as integrative bracketing mechanisms for the text’s more ephemeral as well as fantastical and subversive aspects. To do so, the article builds on recent research on the realist novel which has dragged into the light the intricacies and interdependencies of the seemingly clear-cut categories of formal realism and ephemeral writing. Accordingly, texts such as Peter Wilkins can be treated as sites of exchange or integration between these modes of writing. The article moves from the emerging divide between ‘the novel’ and ephemera in the mid-eighteenth century to Paltock’s frame narrative and to paratextual devices as well as the metaphorical function of flight. By doing so, it will be shown that Paltock’s integrative approach in Peter Wilkins hinges on a deep awareness of the bias between realist and ephemeral/fantastical writing.

The article reflects the experience of teaching an interactive seminar on the topic of rewriting the history of eighteenth-century literature through non-canonical texts. As such, the article considers firstly how to introduce graduate students to the revisionist scholarly debate recasting eighteenth-century literature and secondly how to adapt it in a way that is more relatable to them as digital natives with their concomitant mediatic skills. Attempting a participative literary historiography where students put together a new body of literature based on ‘derivatives’ (excerpts, abridgments, unauthorized imitations, or continuations of originals found on online databases) calls for a systematizing frame. The article proposes to achieve this through the preparatory reading of a choice of canonical works that reflect the contemporary critical responses to the proliferation of print. Not only does this first step avoid the dispersion of participants’ findings, but it also helps participants toward an easier understanding of the Foucauldian dynamics of discourse and how they inform his key notion of the author function and, ultimately, of the literary canon. By the time participants turn to choosing a derivative text in the second half of the course, the article argues, they have a clearer sense of the revisionist importance of such an endeavour.

Since the publication of Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) a steady stream of adaptations reproduced, reimagined, and/or subverted key elements of the genre it set off. Charged with layers of discourse, “each age […] reveals the robinsonade that best fits its needs” (Fisher 2018. “Innovation and Imitation in the Eighteenth-Century Robinsonade.” In The Cambridge Companion to Robinson Crusoe, edited by J. J. Richetti, 99–111. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 104). Consider, for example, Andy Weir’s science-fiction (sf) novel The Martian (2014) where a high degree of intertextuality to Defoe’s novel is juxtaposed with the absence of a native other. By treating The Martian as a deliberate revisitation of prior works (cf. Hutcheon 2006). I aim to investigate marked and unmarked intertextuality according to Sanders’s model of complex filtration of cultural narratives (2015). The Martian invites us to revisit Defoe’s novel as a site of cultural significance for the present-day concern of what it takes to sustain human life.

The contemporary children’s robinsonade exemplifies an amalgamation of several centuries worth of intertexts, visible not only in the texts themselves but also in their audiences. In addition to adapting narrative elements, such as the shipwreck or the encounter with Friday, the narrative intent of didacticism spans over centuries, emulating ideologies of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, or twenty-first-century cultures. By utilising adaptation theory, it is possible to consider the Crusoe story as an interpretively doubled narrative of didacticism and to examine the emergence of the children’s robinsonade through the reception of eighteenth- and twenty-first-century audiences. In comparing the reception of early robinsonades and their narrative structures with the contemporary example of Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa , I aim to show the relation between the early reception of Defoe’s work and contemporary adaptations as parts of the didactic legacy of Robinson Crusoe .