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Before Jane Austen - The Shaping of the English Novel in the Eighteenth Century (Paperback)
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Before Jane Austen - The Shaping of the English Novel in the Eighteenth Century (Paperback)
Series: Routledge Library Editions: 18th Century Literature
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Few centuries have seen greater changes in social perspective and
guiding ideas than the eighteenth century; literature in every
Western country was a powerful instrument not only in recording
these changes but in bringing them about. In England, the rise and
development of a new literary form - the novel - graphically
mirrors that great transition in social ideology, often with rare
entertainment. Originally published in 1965, in the words of
Professor Steeves: 'This volume is to deal with the years in which
the novel was still an experiment. At the beginning of the
eighteenth century there was no novel. By the end, novels of every
description were being published, not in dozens, but in hundreds.
The badness of the product was universally recognized, but perhaps
fifty had emerged out of the ruck of mediocrity, some tolerable,
some good, and some great.' The author tells us that it is the
province of the novel 'to deal with what seems to be real people,
in situations which have the tang of the life of the time and which
pose significant problems related to that life.' He examines the
changing view of the social scene in the works of the great
novelists of the period - Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett,
and Sterne - and in the less familiar but still significant novels
of others from the time. The discussion ends with Austen because
she comes 'exactly at the end of a century highly important in
intellectual and cultural history, and at the beginning of another
century equally epoch-making.... Miss Austen can properly be called
the first modern English novelist, the earliest to be read with the
feeling that she depicts our life, and not a life placed back
somewhere in history, or off somewhere in imagined space'.
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