the PEC for the first year, for the moment. I have looked at the picture.
So Paula do you have any questions? We've got that right. It's got that
right. But if I say things very clearly then the transcript works properly.
It's not too bad, it's been worse on other occasions. Maybe I should spend
a year or two doing this until I speak English which is acceptable for the
transcriber. It works better with my English than my Spanish. So I'll take
that as a no, Paula. Right, so my first question is was there a fundamental
shift towards secularism? Not up to date, that's terrible. Well I think
some of what I have said so far might have given that impression, so I am
going to try to balance that impression. We can say that almost everybody,
the vast majority of the population in the 18th century believed in
miracles. Everybody knew that God created the world on the 23rd of October
4004 BC. I don't know what day of the week it was. And that on the 7th of
December 2349 BC the great flood started and that on Monday 11th May 1491
BC God parted the Red Sea for Moses. Hello. No, not at all. Sounds like a
good idea. So we don't suddenly have an entirely secular society. The most
read and the most published texts of the 18th century are unquestionably
scripture, Bibles and common prayer books and things like that. And the
trade in scriptural commentary was by far the most thriving part of the
book trade in the 1700s. The most reprinted book in the 18th century was
Pilgrim's Progress of 1678 by, who was that by? Who wrote Pilgrim's
Progress? Oh you know that. Right. Nobody? Begins with B. J.B. Bunyan. Yes,
Bunyan. Good. John Bunyan. Almost, so most people, the majority of people
go to church every Sunday. That only fell to less than half in about 1850.
Okay, so we're still talking about a clearly Christian society where people
believe in miracles etc etc. We should not exaggerate the change of the
nature of this society. However it's also true that it was becoming
increasingly popular the idea that the age of miracles is over. This is
quite a famous quote from these times. So while people would automatically
accept that Jesus turned water into wine and saved five thousand people in
all of the biblical miracles, and quite possibly early medieval miracles,
that period of time, hello, that period of history had finished and
miracles did not happen in the modern world for whatever reason that might
be. Also we should say that as has been the case for all of the literature
that we have seen since the beginning of last year, we're not really
interested in the majority of people. We're interested in quite a small
elite, educated elite, less and less people who are actually aristocratic
or people who are members of the royal family but still a very small
minority of educated elite. People increasingly expected, did not expect
inexplicable events. There was the idea that things could be and maybe even
should be explained by science. And that all it took to understand things
was an application of reason. If you remember in a sort of more medieval
context, there's all sorts of things which you really shouldn't question.
They were just God's will and you just accepted it. Okay, so that has
changed quite a lot. And what was the most influential narrative of the
18th century? You have all heard of this book, I promise you. No, Jeremy
Secruso was a minority book written by somebody who most literary people
would not even consider one of them. Daniel Defoe was on the margins of
acceptability. He wasn't, he was somebody who most of the great writers of
this time, like people who considered themselves great writers, like Swift
and Pope would not really have had anything to do with and they tended to
insult whenever they could. No, a book you have heard of since you were
children. In terms of just a single narrative, I'm not talking about
multiple narratives like you have in the Bible. A book called Don Quixote
de la Mancha. What is the nature of which is heavily translated and hugely
popular in the 18th century? We even have the things like The Female
Quixote written by, I can't remember who, in 1815. So a very important,
very influential book at that time. Interestingly, while Don Quixote is
still considered hugely important when studying literature in the United
States, it's not very heavily studied in Britain until you start to study
contemporary culture and you're studying Spanish literature. But at this
time it was a big thing, Don Quixote, or Don Quixote to pronounce it
correctly. So what can we say about Don Quixote de la Mancha? What is the
leading characteristic of that novel? He evolves. Right, how does it flip
it? Right, so it is systematically undermining the miracle-based culture of
medieval romance. It's systematically saying you think you see giants but
in fact you see windmills etc etc etc. You think you see people in shining
armour, in fact it's just the sun getting in your eyes, blah blah blah. So
that actually fits quite well into this process that we're talking about in
terms of the emergence of the modern novel or the emergence of the novel in
England. So with this idea of undermining romance you have the idea of
creating new fictions. One of the most important fictions that is created,
and of course it is largely a fiction, is that human beings are
fundamentally rational. We all do and we all know of situations where
people do things which are fundamentally irrational but the new science of
the 18th century that's emerging, economics, dismal science is based on the
idea of rational individuals and the novel also requires rational
individuals. If people just do things because they just do things as they
do in real life quite often. If you actually look at police reports and
things like that a lot of people especially younger people will say when
they're asked why did you do this their standard response will be I don't
know. That is actually a basic part of human function but the idea that
there is cause and effect is incredibly fine. The idea that we live in a
rational universe, okay, if we're talking about an increasingly deist view
of the world then God's come along has created this wonderful machine which
is the universe and then he's gone off to have a cup of tea or whatever.
He's not intervening on a day-to-day basis that is the basic deist opinion.
So there's this idea that of course God exists and then sits back and sees
how it works. And so we need a literature for the new rational minds which
is of course intimately connected as well with the bourgeois mind. It
becomes hugely important to create a predictable society. Why do we need a
predictable society? Isn't it fun if we don't know what's going to happen
tomorrow? No, it's not fun to know who Putin is going to invade tomorrow or
whether Christmas is actually going to happen. Well, okay. They've created
a world largely in the 17th century which is full of fictions. The most
important fictions are two things which are basically space and time. So
they have invented reasonably good functioning clocks and each town has a
slightly different time but each town is run by clock in the square etc.
And there is this fiction which is chronological time that the world is
ruled by a machine type time which of course has nothing to do with human
reality. Human reality is that you should eat when you are hungry not when
you sleep at eight o'clock and the day finishes when the sun goes down.
That's the natural world, that human beings have existed in for tens of
thousands or hundreds of thousands of years previous. It's quite
interesting to read even for example in ancient Greece where people had
water clocks and things like this, they suddenly were talking about the
tyranny of time that they had to eat not when they were hungry but when the
water clock told them that it was time to eat and it was terrible. They
preferred their freedom before having clocks and the same is true of maps.
Maps are a fiction, they're a fiction which we have accepted so completely
that we're perfectly happy with them but a map eliminates the vast majority
of details and fixates on a few details. So I mean a real picture for
example of a battlefield or somewhere you want to explore in South America
or whatever has all sorts of different types of plants and it's like you
know in Google Maps where you have the photograph of the satellite
photograph instead of the... that is some sort of reality but the Google
Map is a complete fiction because it just selectively choosing what they've
decided is important. But those fictions help us to feel that we are in
control of the world. It's much easier to control the world from Google
Maps than from Google satellite image, yeah? Because it's all green and
mixed and you don't know what things are whereas with Google Maps you know
what everything is the same with time. I control time, I control space,
therefore I am a happier human being because what is the most important
thing in society especially from the 18th century onwards? Money.
Excellent, good, correct. This is bourgeois culture. The reason you want
stability is not because stability is more fun, it's less fun. But if
you're making an investment, if you're putting your money into things you
want to be able to predict the future, a predictable future. You have to
actually conform the future in your own image. Your own image is as a
bourgeois individual who wants to be able to invest money now and get more
money back in the future. You can only do that in a predictable society
with laws where there is a police force that will ensure that your products
get back to market, etc. The whole of society is recreated in that
bourgeois image so that that type of bourgeois society works and it needs
its own literature and its own literature is the novel. So the great
literature until now has been romance, which really has got a great deal to
do with reality. It's satire, which doesn't have to relate to the reality
as such. Spiritual biography, which refers to not the material world but
the spiritual world. That is the individual life viewed from a spiritual
context. All of these types of literature are about teaching people how to
live. The novel tries to present a believable, a very similar image of how
people actually live. It doesn't, of course. It's just the new fiction but
it wants to create the impression that's what it's doing. Having said that,
we have to be very careful. We will find throughout the 18th century,
indeed into 19th century Victorian fiction, references to divine justice
and to teleology. The fundamental idea, at least in the context of
literature, is that things are progressing towards a specific end.
Everything's happening for a reason and we've seen this plenty of times in
theatre. There's this idea that things are developing towards the
conclusion of the play and you have to have a conclusion point. One of the
great problems of all types of narrative literature is the teleological
paradox. The teleological paradox is that you want a conclusion but you
also want to be able to look behind the curtain and know what's going to
happen to the characters afterwards. It's actually quite difficult to do
both things at the same time. One of the things that we tend to do, for
example in comedy, is we say and they got married. Comedy typically ends in
marriage because you have some intuition about what's going to happen to
these people you've invested time in afterwards but a point in time which
can be seen as a conclusion has been reached. The conclusion was reached in
tragedy in the West is the death of somebody. Yes, of course, that is going
to go on in some form. The Norwegians are going to take over Denmark and
Hamlet etc but all of the people that we're interested in basically are
dead. The end of King Lear, everybody's dead apart or just about to die
apart from Edgar. So there will be some sort of future with Edgar in charge
that can probably be a bit better but as far as we're concerned that story
has been concluded. However, those references to divine justice and
teleology in literature ring increasingly hollow. They are less and less
and less convincing. So when you have somebody like Maud Flanders, who you
may have heard of, I hope. Have you finished yet? Well, but you have one
more week to finish and next week we will do it. You like it? Good. Or you
mean the Mackie? Maud Flanders? Okay, good. So she will refer to God and
things like that when it's convenient for her. One of the things that I
want to think about over the next week, and you may want to play the same
game as me and see if you come to the same conclusions. I will probably ask
you about this, is the relevance of the concept of cognitive dissonance to
Maud Flanders. Cognitive dissonance. Do you know what cognitive dissonance
is? Cognitive dissonance is basically the idea that all of us as
individuals hate contradicting ourselves. We hate appearing either
hypocritical or contradictory to ourselves. So we reinvent the world, we
reinvent the truth and narratives about ourselves so they fit with our
story about ourselves. So we have a situation where, I think interestingly
from the point of view of 18th century society, much more than for us, Maud
Flanders is probably a bad person. For us, Maud Flanders isn't a bad
person. She is a very brave woman who is making her way in a fundamentally
unfair society. Almost certainly, the 18th century view of her would be
more negative. It's not an absolute character assassination, but probably
the opinion of the time would be more condemnatory than our opinion. If we
take, for example, as our starting point, Maud the mum, Maud as mother,
then you see that as a fundamental role of women in society, as people did
then and should not do now. I'm not arguing that. Then there are things
that are improvable in Maud Flanders, we can probably say from that
perspective. But the extent to which we can actually see a process of Maud
taking her reality and transforming it into a narrative that where she can
be successful. Ultimately, we are all inventing, continually inventing
stories about ourselves, where we are the protagonist, we are the heroes of
our lives. And there may be bits of tragic story where we are unfairly
unlucky or whatever. And then maybe bits of comedy where we are fortunate
and love helps us, blah, blah, blah. But that's fundamentally what we are
doing. Yeah? It's not an objective truth. It is something that we invent
continually for ourselves. And so I think it will be very interesting, as I
said, over the next week, hopefully by then, to think about how Maud
Flanders plays into that idea of cognitive dissonance. Of course, cognitive
dissonance is, as a concept, just 30 years old. It's not from this time.
But of course, people have an awareness that reality is subjective and is
to some extent a personal construct for much longer. Anyway, that's another
question. Of course. Yeah, of course. But we actually are going to see
relatively few first-person narratives. And in a third-person narrative,
there tends to be more the idea that what you're being shown is something
more or less objective. But we'll talk about narratology at the end of the
class. Why did the modern novel emerge in Britain in the 18th century and
not before? There was a growth in literacy. Okay, but that growth in
literacy starts with the invention of the printing press in Britain in 1480
and continues to grow until universal literacy is more or less achieved at
the beginning of the 20th century. Almost universal literacy is achieved by
the beginning of the Victorian period. The literacy rates in Britain in,
say, the 1830s are very high. In fact, surprisingly high. But even so, that
is very much a continuing process and the novel appears and matures over,
really, a few decades. To go from Robinson Crusoe and Mold Flanders to
Tristan Ashandy, which is a post-modern novel almost in 40 years, is pretty
damn crazy. In one generation we go from the novel basically sort of being
invented in a more or less modern form but without chapters and things like
that, which is problematic in itself, to something which is enormously
self-referential and complex and absolutely brilliant, like Tristan
Ashandy. It's a shame we don't study Tristan Ashandy, but that's life. So
why? True, yes, there are more people who can read. What else? Printing.
Okay, what happens with printing? Okay, but there's a growth in presses and
there is a cheapening of the printing process. So books become a bit
cheaper. They are still luxury items, it has to be added and not everybody
can afford to have books. Anything else? Yeah, the circulating libraries
are very important. It's fascinating because, oh, we have something to be
said for them. Not really though, I'm just wondering if all these metaphors
could be considered as a predecessor of the Bristolian novel? Sorry, that
might surprise you. Yes, and that's the next point I was going to make to
some extent, so I'll come back to that, Paolo, in just a second. I'll just
mention quickly about the circulating libraries. Novelists, to begin with,
were hugely suspicious of circulating libraries because they were buying
books and lots of people were reading the same copy of the book. So the
idea initially was, this is terrible, but it's a little bit like, I don't
know, a musician who is worried that their video is appearing on YouTube.
They will not exist if their video doesn't appear on YouTube so it's hugely
important in terms of increasing their popularity, their reputation, their
marketability etc. And circulating libraries are so popular that it does
mean that quite a lot of their books are being bought even if they're being
involved in circulating libraries. So very quickly, I mean you do get some
comments in literature of people grumbling about circulating libraries and
I wrote this and somebody else is making money from it, but pretty quickly
they realise that circulating libraries are their friends, they're not
their competition. Not really, no. Yeah, that's one thing much more. I mean
it depends if different people have different contracts, but yeah generally
speaking it's not as we would understand it today certainly. In terms of
what Paolo was saying, I don't know if you can read it, but basically
asking about metamorphosis and things like that. You know in the sense that
the important thing in metamorphosis is the moral of the different legends
that are being told rather than development of character and personality.
But it is a good point in the sense that it is fundamentally ridiculous to
talk about the emergence of the novel in the early 1700s in England. This
is a very, very long slow process. Instead of saying that Mold Flanders is
the first novel we could easily say that The Unfortunate Traveller by
Thomas Nash 1594, so written at the time of Shakespeare was the first
novel. We could say that The English Rogue by Richard Head 1665, at the
time of The Great Plague and The Great Fire of London, was the first novel.
It's similar, it's less successful but it's similar in many of its
descriptions to Mold Flanders and that's only in the English context. We've
already mentioned Don Quixote being important, the tales of Genji in 11th
century Japan very, very important. I mean they're fundamentally anecdotal
short stories but Mold Flanders is fundamentally anecdotes added together.
It's not that much, I mean there's some continuity but it's largely a
selection of funny stories if you like or interesting stories. So there is
an important step forward in England, well in London really, in the early
18th century but it's part of a bigger process and we have to look in terms
of world literature. There's stuff in Egypt as well, there's stuff before
the common era but there's you know a thousand years BC in Egypt which has
elements of novels as well so it's a long slow process and it doesn't sort
of appear from nothing. However, in all of the literature that we've seen
so far in Chaucer or Spencer or Shakespeare or Milton, there is the idea
that you should use a traditional plot. Why should you use a traditional
plot? Why do we have a situation where we have some people like Boccaccio,
some people in English and etc who pretend that their story comes from an
old story, it's not their story when we know that it's not true. They have
in fact made up the story and they pretend that it is an old story but it's
not true. It's not their story why would you do that? It's fundamentally
stupid from our point of view. Okay and perhaps, I mean that would
certainly be a good argument for Gothic literature and when we get to the
Gothic literature there is that idea that it's an old story and might be
true or something. Okay, fundamentally there is an idea in
pre-enlightenment Christendom, Europe, that nature is complete. God created
nature and nature is finished. And with the completion of nature basically
all of the story types have been completed. So nature's finished and all of
the potential human stories by and large have been created. So what the
creative writer's job is to do variations on those things, a little bit
like jazz or something like that. You have the basic, I know nothing about
jazz but I'm going to say that anyway, I may be completely wrong, you have
the idea of a complete and changing world whose stories have been created
and so you are making those stories if you like more relatable to your
audience but you're not fundamentally changing stories. Only in the 18th
century does the idea appear that novelty, of course important in this
context, is a good thing. Until the 18th century novelty is a bad thing.
You should be basing what you've written on somebody else's stories, not
making them up for yourself. So romance had offered a world of wonder
without rational sequence and without rational consequence. There was a
belief in a divine plan which could be rigidly applied to everyone in all
situations. God has a plan, God may be sitting back now in our deist world
to some extent and just letting the plan play out but that plan is in
place. Alongside that we have the idea that only the lives of the upper
class are considered worthy of serious contemplation. Yes, we can
occasionally have people from the lower classes appearing in comedy because
they're sort of funny and stupid but all important stories happen to kings
and queens and nobility. In that process of change we have our old friend
William Congreve, who was William Congreve? Thank you. The author of The
Way of the World made an important contribution to literary criticism of
the novel when in his preface to his novella Incognito, which was written
in 1692, so a few years before The Way of the World, he distinguished
between the aims and methods of the earlier romances and the realism of the
new novels. It's interesting because he writes this in 1892 and he's
talking about the new novels and of course that's significantly before Moll
Flanders or Robinson Crusoe or any of these things have actually been
written. So again, we have to be aware that there is a process. That
preface to Incognito has been called the earliest important criticism of
fiction. Another change in society is the invention of skin reading. Until
this time, basically everybody read aloud. We have a few cases in history
of people who read silently and other commentators say they're a bit mad
because they read silently. Reading is a minority activity which is done
for a lot of other people and so as a majority activity, really listening
to something being read exists but it's only a minority of people who can't
read. Remember that details like separating words and punctuation and
things that actually make reading a pleasurable experience take a long time
to appear. You look at something like Beowulf, continuous text, it's just
crazy. Not only do you not understand it because it's in a foreign
language, Anglo-Saxon, but even if it was written in modern English, it
would take quite a lot of interpretation. People learn to read extensively
and to skin read and that begins to replace the old focus on a few books.
In the old world you could read the Bible or have the Bible read to you,
the consolation philosophy or Atheist commonplace books, a few other
things, some poetry and you're set. That's all you have to read and you may
want to read it lots of times. In the new reading for the world of the
novel and the two things are dialectic in their relationship people are
skin reading and they want to be reading much much wider and you can only
do that with circulating libraries and the ability to skin read. So with a
novel, as you all know, if you momentarily get lost in the thought and
they're sort of considered through the text but you're not actually
concentrating, it doesn't really matter. If you're reading a short poem or
something you're likely to lose because it's very condensed. A novel isn't
and you can go swiftly through purple passages and things like that, things
that interest you a little bit less. So novels are ideal for skin reading.
How were the conditions conducive to the rise of the novel? Sort of answer
some of this. So we ditch the idea of a divine plan. The world happens
according to logic but not following a particular plan and there is an
increased interest therefore in character. This is a fundamental difference
about the idea of people's role in the world, in the cosmos. So they're
much more agency, people are much more important in terms of creating their
own reality, creating their own lives and it's also another fundamental
change for this is the idea that writing prose, writing extensive prose, is
worthy of major intellects. We have things that are novel-like in the 17th
century but they are generally speaking written by people who are not the
great writers of the time. It's only when you have great writers who begin
to actually show an interest in writing novels that the novel takes great
import. There's a distinction between 17th century adventure stories where
miracles and crazy things can happen and an 18th century adventure story
like Gulliver's, sorry I mean Wilkinson where everything is grounded in a
believable reality. In fact, it's based on a real experience by a sailor
who was marooned called Alexander Selkirk and Dafoe marketed originally as
a real account. It's not marketed as a novel and so the world of Pigafetta,
going around with Magellan, which you should of course pronounce Magellan
in my best Portuguese, is talking about people who are four meters tall and
have their faces in their stomachs this type of thing, is fundamentally
different from a world as described in something like Robinson Crusoe.
Clearly the people in Robinson Crusoe are foreign, are strange, are if you
like savage men. Some of them are noble savages, some of them are not but
they are not otherworldly, it is not supernatural in that sort of sense. So
there is a fundamental distinction and I think that is the sort of, I mean
by the beginning of the 18th century it's pretty clear that the world was
populated by other human beings rather than dragons and ogres and monsters
and people and patagons who have only one leg and all of the other stuff
that the early explorers talked about. So, yes I mean there's a place for
adventure definitely but I think by this stage a lot of people, and there
are adventure novels throughout and there are people who are enjoying
something like Gulliver's Travels rather than being satire on modern
British society as being an adventure novel etc. Yeah, well yeah I mean you
would not probably want to give a child an original version of Gulliver's
Travels. It's not really good reading for children, it's only the
bolderised version which is acceptable for children but yes you can read it
as an exciting travel story. But yeah, so I mean I think we can make that
distinction. We have the idea of having sufficient readers which we've
already mentioned. An increase in literacy is combined with a rise in
standards of living, so there are more people who can actually buy books
even if the majority of people can't, and more leisure time definitely. And
it also, the novel is entirely a product of the commercial ethos of the
late 17th and early 18th century book trade. Novels are written for the
first time to satisfy popular tastes. They're not written to satisfy
patrons who want members of their family to look good or things like this,
or to satisfy aristocratic tastes. You are writing a novel fundamentally
because you want to make money and it's not any pretense of anything else
is meaningless in the world of the novel. People still are still writing
poetry because they are great artists and la la la la but at this point
people are writing novels to make money and that is completely in tune with
the experience of the London bourgeoisie. One of the reasons again why the
novel is important for the capital's bourgeoisie is because you are
increasingly having to interact with people who have other world views. If
it's not entirely a multi-ethnic or multicultural society, it's certainly a
multi-denominational society. It's a society where you have Catholics and
Protestants, non-conformists, Protestants and Anglicans and increasingly
Jewish people interacting in the day-to-day life. So you actually have to
be able to understand other viewpoints of reality because people have other
sets of values. If you live in a monolithic society there is one truth and
you just have to know what the truth is. Anybody else is a heretic and
that's solved. But if you're living in a multi-denominational or
multicultural society and you want to do business with people who don't
think exactly the same as you but you can do business with them, you need
to develop your ability to see the world through other people's eyes. You
need that type of empathy. Obviously not, but again the getting of degrees
is not actually that important in bourgeois society. Some of the most
successful people in business at this time, especially other
non-conformists who are not allowed to go to university either, because
they're not worried about silly things like getting a degree. Getting a
degree is learning a lot of Latin, learning a lot of Greek and knowing
rhetoric largely. They're not actually that useful in business. But it's a
small circle of an intellectual and an aristocratic elite rather than the
business elite. What you want to do fundamentally is make money. It depends
what you mean by high class. There is a clear differentiation between
people who are nobility and people who are bourgeois, because the bourgeois
work and the nobility by definition don't work. That is their fundamental
weakness. The nobility don't work and they need money because they have
expensive things to waste money on, like hunting and gambling. Somebody is
bourgeois and then they get their children married into a noble family and
they go up a scale generationally and all that sort of thing. That's an
acceptable compromise for the aristocracy, and it's an acceptable
aristocracy for the bourgeoisie. So they're considered different. When
we're reading things like private hedonists, whether you are or you aren't
bourgeois, whether you are a gentleman or a gentleman's daughter, etc., it
is hugely important. The defining nature of that is not working. It's a
completely unhealthy society in that sense. The idea that you're somebody
because you don't work, whereas from our point of view again, if you don't
work, you're a parasite. So the idea that that is what makes you more
important than everybody else is a fundamentally different way of seeing
the world. So the bourgeoisie need this idea that things happen for a
reason, that myth, because that helps them to believe in the stability of
their society. And novels strengthen that myth. There is also the rise of
individualism. Individualism is a European idea, a continental idea, hugely
perhaps very popular in the Anglosphere and probably more important in the
Anglosphere than in continental Europe. But it is originally a European
idea. And with the rise of individualism, you get the rise of an interest
in the idiosyncrasies of the individual. What is interesting about people
is not so much the types they conform to, and we're still seeing types in
the way of the world, and we saw lots of types in The Canterbury Tales,
etc. But what makes them stand out as individuals from everybody else? It's
a different focus there. And people's private lives start to become
important. Novels are something that you read in private and people's
private lives become interesting. So, the previous literature, poetry and
drama were largely about public responsibility. They're largely about what
people should do as leaders of society. What we have with the novel is an
interest of what other people do behind closed doors. So, the novel is
prosaic in the sense that it's prose, but it's also prosaic in the sense
that it is about everyday experience of ordinary people. There are no
monarchs in novels until somebody like Walter Scott comes along and he's
writing historical novels, but the monarchs basically disappear from
literature throughout most of the 18th century. And the aristocracy may be
there, but they're not the fundamental focus of things. Okay, so we've
talked a bit about the economic factors, blah, blah, blah. And of course
all of this ties in with the periodical essays and periodicals in general
because an important part of the periodicals is book reviews. So, you're
constantly being encouraged to read something else and that is a sort of
dynamic process. Which existing genres contributed to the emerging novel?
Literally everything. Okay, very good. So, the comic theatre has been
described as the womb of the novel, the uterus of the novel. Comic theatre
is very, very important in terms of the development of realistic dialogue
and people being buffeted around by circumstance. And of course comedies
generally are not so focused on just generals and monarchs and people like
that. A huge advance in short stories throughout the 18th century.
Afroben's Orinoco, very important in terms of that. The character sketches
of the periodical essays, the idea that it can be fascinating to describe
in minute detail people who are, if not recognizably somebody that you
know, recognizably like people you see in the world around you. So, they're
realistic people. Travel writing, you have people like Defoe writing a tour
through Great Britain and later at the end of the century you have Mary
Wollstonecraft doing some very important travel writing in Scandinavia. But
the idea that when you're writing travel books suddenly we're in a
situation where people can travel for fun, for interest. You would only
have travelled with an armed guard, etc., unless you didn't have any money
at all and weren't worth robbing in Britain in previous centuries. But
travel is increasingly safe. It's not absolutely safe. One of the amusing
things that happens, sort of amusing, is that Horace Walpole, the son of
the Prime Minister, is attacked by hiremen and left for dead basically. I
mean he's unconscious for a while. When we go on to look at Grey's Elegy,
which we'll do in two weeks time or something, that's relevant because he
was a personal friend of Thomas Grey, etc., etc. So it's not absolutely
safe but it is increasingly safe and so you increasingly get situations
where by the end of the century we have people like Wordsworth going on
walking tours and nobody did that before. Apart from anything else, only
peasants walked before. The idea that somebody who was educated could
travel around by walking was crazy before the emergence of the romantic
method. If you travelled and you were anybody, you went by horse or by
carriage. You did not walk. So that changes but of course if you are
walking around, you are seeing everyday life and you are observing things
in slow detail. One of my experiences in my youth was a friend of mine
lived on a canal boat. South of England, most of England basically is
covered with canals, much more than happens in Spain. Something similar
happens in France. It's an advantage of having a largely flat country with
a dense population. It's quite a cheap way of moving things around. Of
course a generation after building this network, people invented railways
and the canal system became a pretty new problem. Anyway, my friend lived
on a canal boat and he was asked by a canal boat company to take a canal
boat whose motor was damaged something like 60 miles, maybe 100 kilometres
across Oxfordshire and they would count it to a place where it was going to
be fit but it could only travel at about three kilometers an hour. The
boat, when it was working properly, could travel a bit faster but it was a
really fascinating experience because you would see something in the
distance and 40 minutes later or something, you would still be able to see
the same thing in the distance behind you. But because of that type of pace
of life, your ability to see the detail of what was around you was
fundamentally different from traveling around the country in highways or
cars or whatever. The same sort of thing happens when you're walking but if
you're on a canal boat, you're not even sort of concentrating on walking,
you're just traveling along. So that nature of traveling and travel
writing, going beyond going to see Vesuvius in eruption or to see St.
Mark's Square in Venice and the sort of things that are being mentioned in
Volponi to just the details of everyday life is a fundamental change which
is relative here. The huge explosion in biographies, remember that Defoe
tried to pass Robertson Crusoe off as a genuine memoir, the second amount
of attempts to pass Bob Flanders off as a real biography etc. And the
biographical writing advances enormously in the 18th century, both in terms
of the lives written by Johnson and fundamentally in Bosworth's biography
of Samuel Johnson which is the great work of biography writing. Any
biography of Samuel Johnson. Increasingly people are publishing collections
of letters and of course once you've published collections of letters which
are interesting you can begin to fictionalize that and have epistolary
novels and that is a major genre from the middle of the century. We have
pamphlets especially the Newgate calendar, what is the Newgate calendar?
When you want to enjoy yourself on a Saturday in London in the early 18th
century what is the best option? Go and see a hammy. So if you want to go
and see a hammy, hammies are fun because typically the person who's going
to be hammed is allowed to stop in each pub along the way towards Tyburn
and so they get to being hammed significantly drunk and so you're likely to
see quite a spectacle. They are either going to be defiant or they're going
to be pathetic and sort of, you know, it wasn't my fault and the world's
been fooled to me or something like that and everybody is hanging around
eating their popcorn, well it's not popcorn but you know what I mean,
eating pepas and buying different types of food and one of the things which
is on sale is pamphlets which are describing in beautiful detail the crimes
committed etc. So if you want to make a bit of quick money out of writing
you produce pamphlets so that people can know what they're watching. It's
much more exciting to see an execution if you know why somebody is being
executed, what they've done etc. And that feeds into the whole process of
the novel and of course it feeds into other literature. We have things like
The Beggar's Opera which is fundamentally set in the criminal world at this
time. An early novel by Johnson was Jonathan Savage which is a sort of
fictionalized version of the life of one of the famous criminals at this
time. So the fundamental nature of the novel is that it is a hybrid and it
has an effortless social range in part because of its freedom from
traditional constraints. Everybody has been writing for over a thousand
years about the rules of poetry, about decorum, if it's Horace, or writing
about the sublime in terms of Longinus etc. So there's all sorts of theory
about how you have to write a poem. Poems have rules, theatre has rules.
From the time of Aristotle and the Unities and all of this type of thing,
theatre has rules. But because the novel is popular literature rather than
highbrow literature, there are no rules, nobody's written any rules yet and
that makes it a fundamentally free arena in which to play around with
literature. It's far more interesting if you are not constrained by rules
but you can write, to some extent, whatever you want and experiment. And so
that allows all of these people who are almost all of them are also
involved in other aspects of the literature business to also write novels
and to experiment. And that is probably why we have such an explosion in
types of novels and in the popularity of the novel at this time. So what is
a Bildungsroman? Or if you prefer, was ist ein Bildungsroman? Okay, so
literally that means novel of formation in German. We like the word
Bildungsroman because it sounds good and we use it in English. But what
would the more natural English expression be? A coming-of-age novel. So a
coming-of-age novel or a Bildungsroman are fundamentally the same thing.
The most interesting part of people's lives is when they transition from
being children to being independent adults. In terms of women in this type
of society, often that is the only interesting part of their lives because
it's only the period when they are transitioning between the control of a
father and the control of a husband where they have some independence of
action, if you like, in that society. But I mean, you know, once people
sort of settle into a career and that sort of thing, they are less
interesting. We have to accept we are less interesting than people who are
in the process of discovering themselves. And two of those things actually
play enormously into the fact that the 18th century novel and the 19th
century novel have a huge contribution from women. There are several
reasons for this. One reason is that you can write a novel and remain
anonymous, which is good because you don't become a public figure in the
same way which is always going to be dangerous for a woman. But also it is
hugely important that the novel is not very serious literature. So women
are allowed to and not so criticised for writing novels. If a woman tries
to be a great poet or tries to write history, they have to be bloody good
at it. I mean there are some, but they have to be really good at it for
that to be acceptable. But for somebody to write, for a woman sorry, to
write mediocre history or mediocre poetry, she's supposed to be published.
She's likely to be very much attacked and it has to be very good. And we
do, as you will see, we do get major women poets and major women historians
in this century but they are not particularly common. But the novel allows
us to do this. As I said before, you have a situation where Fanny Burney's
novel Evelina earns her what she would have earned in 100 years of being a
Japanese. So it's actually, if you get it right, it can be a really good
way out of poverty, a really good way towards financial stability. But so,
I mean women are able and keen to write novels and a lot of the novels
which they write are bills for men. And they at least superficially are
very much related to conduct books in the sense of warning other young
women about the dangers, the minefield that is growing up and finding a
husband without losing their honour and this type of thing. So, a lot of
female writing at this time is highly conservative it has to be said
because it's safer and people are much happier about a woman writing
warning other women not to flirt, not to behave in a way that could be seen
as promiscuous because that will ruin their prospects. And of course, a
father is much more likely to buy a book which is going to be successful in
terms of the marriage market and how he chooses or wants to dispose of his
daughter than something that is salacious. So there are salacious books but
they're not going to be bought by fathers who have money for daughters who
do not. What is a monologic epistolary novel and can you give an example?
One perspective, one person writes in the letters. Can anybody think of an
example? Pamela which you will insist on calling Pamela. Pamela by
Richardson is hugely important in terms of establishing the epistolary
novel as a serious genre and as a respectable genre and that is monologic.
What about a dialogic epistolary novel? So dialogic is the letters between
two people, it's two people writing. A typical example would be Evelina by
Cammy Burney or indeed Clarissa again by Richardson. One of the ways that
the literature departments in Cambridge University decide to do a FIBA is
in the first two weeks they tell their students that they have to read
Clarissa. Clarissa is over a million words long, it's a really long novel
and of course it's important. I've only read bits of it, I haven't read the
whole thing because it's not actually a moment in literature I'm not that
keen on, but I mean it's well written. It could be short, it doesn't really
fit in with what we expect from reading and being quite that long to be
honest. And so we have polylogic epistolary novels which mean that we have
several voices simultaneously or sequentially writing letters to each other
and different people. Can anybody think of an example? A book called
Frankenstein. Frankenstein has various people writing letters to each other
and that's how the book is constructed. We have memoir novels, what's a
memoir novel? So it is a fictional autobiography. An example? A book called
Moll Flanders, Orange is the Crucifixion. Well it is basically, I mean it's
dictated in the same way as we could say that, I mean the first biography
in English literature is Margaret Champer's book of, the Book of Margaret
Champers, I guess it was called. Sorry? Yeah yeah that's what you said,
yeah. It's false, I mean if we're talking about novels then a novel is not
autobiography, it's false autobiography. So when we use that, a memoir
novel is written by the person who is the protagonist? No, if you think
about it illiterally then all of the people in society who are illiterate
by definition cannot have a memoir. So what has been happening since the
14th century? The Book of Margaret Champer, written in the very beginning
of the 15th century is actually dictated to a priest by Margaret Champer
but it is her real recollections of her life and the things that have
happened to her and it's fascinating you get the opportunity to read it.
But she doesn't write it because she's illiterate but she has dictated her
story to a priest and he has copied it down verbatim and that's the
reality, that's not the fiction. So that type of situation is being
fictionalised in something like Moll Flanders but effectively it's a
memoir, but a fictional memoir. But we can count it as a memoir even though
she did not literally write it in the fiction, it was dictated to somebody.
So that's why it's a memoir novel, not a memoir. If it was a memoir it
would be somebody's authentic account. We could also talk about the Vicar
of Wakefield which is a sentimental novel from the later part of the
century or a book called Jane Eyre which you will learn to love. Okay and
then we have novels of character. What's a novel of character? Okay there's
a major interest in the psychology of the central character and their
motives for what they do and how this will affect how they develop as a
person. So you could argue that the Bildungsroman is a sub-genre of the
novel of character but you couldn't say that for example Moll Flanders was
a bildungsroman, the first bit of Moll Flanders is a bildungsroman, but
because it covers the whole of her life it is a novel of character among
several things and Pamela is definitely a novel of character. I hope it's
becoming clear from what I'm saying that novels can fit into several
categories of novel. One book can cover several definitions. We have novels
of incident where a greater weight of interest is on what the character
will do next and how the story will come out. Something like Robinson
Crusoe is a novel of incident. We're not that interested in Robinson
Crusoe's psychology, we're interested in the adventure as it were and then
finally we have the novel of sentiment or the sentimental novel sometimes
called the novel of sensibility and the object of the novel of sentiment is
to illustrate the connection between acute sensibility and true virtue. So
it's those like a moral objective to the novel of sentiment and an
adherence to strict morality and honour combined with copious feeling and a
sympathetic heart where the hallmarks of a person are of sentiment. So
Pamela in one sense is a novel of sentiment. Probably one of the most
influential novels of sentiment would be Sir Charles Grandison which is
written by Henry Fielding. And more and more these days and you have a
process well I mean that is hugely influential that was Jane Austen's
mother's favourite book and was hugely influential on Jane Austen partly
because Jane Austen was very keen on satirising it but it is very very
influential there. The idea of this sort of there you have the re-emergence
of the aristocrat as this sort of great noble figure who looks after the
people who are underneath him in a more realistic world and that has a big
big influence on Darcy. So what can we say about narratology? So one of the
interests is in narrative points of view. Is the narrator a character i.e.
participant in the story? If the narrator is a participant in the story
they are intradiegetic and if they are not a participant they are extra
diegetic. So if you remember one of the things in your favourite book Eges
last year was the whole thing about the fact that the narrator in The
Canterbury Tales is intradiegetic. An extra diegetic narrator is above or
superior to the story being narrated, the intradiegetic narrator is inside
the fictional world created by the story and therefore of course has a
partial view of the world, doesn't see everything. If you have an
omnipresent narrator they know everything that's happening basically. So we
also have the question of the narrative voice, how is the story being told?
And the narrative mode, how does the author convey the story to the reader?
Narrative points of view plus narrative voice is narrative mode. So we
might be talking about a first person narrator, first person narrative, an
example of which is, yay good, Moll Flanders where and also Gulliver's
Travels and also Tristan Shanley etc. We have a situation where there are
frame narrators where the reports of the actions of others frame typically
a first person narrative such as... There is a narrator at the beginning
and the end who introduces what's going to happen. An example of that, Moll
Flanders again. Beginning of Moll Flanders we have Daniel Defoe telling,
giving us a brief introduction etc. Where do we get that from? Where does
the frame narrator actually come from? In the case of a prologue. Right,
but there's a character, Shakespeare has that in the Tale of the Shrew. The
Tale of the Shrew is a dream told by a drunk. So, a man gets drunk, falls
asleep and when he wakes up everybody around him tries to convince him that
he is this important person and he tells them about his dream. It's a
failure failure in the sense that we only have the opening of the frame
narrative. Shakespeare forgets to end it. We would normally expect there to
be a beginning and the end. But where does Shakespeare get that idea in the
Tale of the Shrew? I mentioned dream. The idea of a frame narrative comes
from medieval dream vision, so something like Piers Plamond. In Piers
Plamond there is always a dreamer and then they have their dream and the
action is the dream. Okay, so that actually comes all the way out of
medieval literature and the frame narrative. We can have limited
third-person narrator, which means okay they're not omniscient. There's a
situation where they can only see what a certain character or sometimes
certain characters see. They don't know anything else. Even though things
have been told on the third person, they are limited by what the character
can know. We have omniscient third-person narrators where they are
basically sort of God watching over the rest of us and commenting on
things. There are third-person subjective narratives where the narrator
conveys thoughts, feelings, opinions etc. of one or more characters. We
have third-person objective narrators which employ a narrator who tells the
story without describing any character's thoughts, opinions or feelings.
Instead all you get is an objective unbiased point of view. What is
narrative transvestism? What might it mean? Well, it's when the author
writes a story from the point of view of somebody of the opposite sex.
Typically there's quite a lot of male authors writing from a female point
of view in this century. The most famous examples are the Spanish Hill and
Pamela and Clarissa. That involves a man trying to imagine what it is like
to be a woman more or less successfully. One of the things we might want to
talk about next week is how successful Daniel LaFoe is in imagining the
female experience. But of course you can get that the other way around as
well. And we have to ask ourselves in these cases what does it imply? What
does it imply that a man writes a whole story from the point of view of a
woman? But why has that not happened before? Why do we not have long
narratives written by men imagining themselves being women? Right, on both
those points. We have the Renaissance idea, it's called humanism but it
should probably be called menism, where human beings are noble men.
Children, the non-nobility and women are not fully human from that point of
view and from the point of view of basically everybody until the late 17th,
early 18th century. The fact that you can have a situation where a man
thinks that it can be interesting to go through that imaginative process
suggests a fundamental change in the value of at least some women. And when
we have 18th century feminism, if you can use that word, it tends to be
worthwhile feminism. It tends to be about how worthwhile women are as
intellectually capable as worthwhile men rather than saying all women are
as important as all men. Only in the very last years of, for example, Mary
Wollstonecraft's life does she begin to imagine the possibility that the
experience of working-class women is also valid and important in their
capability. Yeah, yeah. Well yeah and it also depends which Pankhurst
you're talking about. Sophie Pankhurst was much more left-wing than her
mother, for example. But that's a different story. Okay, so next week
finally we get to Walthamnes. So make sure you have finished and I didn't.
Basically what we have to go is Walthamnes is next week and we have
tutorials on the gothic novel, women writers, Mary Wollstonecraft and
Frankenstein probably too in January. We could have two classes in January,
yeah. So I will give you Christmas to enjoy Frankenstein. So all you will
have to do basically for once you finish Walthamnes is read anything with a
book, but it's quite a long time and you'll just have to read Elegy. So
we'll see Mary, possibly I think what I may as well do is combine women
writers with, do that quite quickly and combine that with Mary
Wollstonecraft. So there'll be more information than we can actually fit
into the tutorial, but my tutorial on Mary Wollstonecraft is often just a
little bit short and that it's important to know about her, but I there are
not really very often exam questions about her directly. I mean the obvious
exam questions are going to be about Frankenstein. So I mean knowing
something about Mary Wollstonecraft is also very, very interesting for
understanding Frankenstein, but the question probably will not be directly
that.