Month: October 2019

Updated 10/24/19: I’ve added my third source and annotation to the end of this list.

Mckeon, Michael. “Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel.” Cultural Critique 1 (1985): 159–181. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1354286.

McKeon argues that there are “great instances of categorical instability” that led to the rise of the novel: instability of literary genre categories and instability of “social categories” (161). He describes the first as “a major cultural transition in attitudes toward how to tell the truth in narrative” (161). And the second, as “a cultural crisis in attitudes toward how the external social order is related to the internal, moral state of its members” (161).

Regarding genre categories, there was on one side a criticism of “romantic” novels that became a “naive empiricist championing of ‘true history’” (163). But which was then met by a counter-critique that insisted the version these “naïve empiricists” put forth still wasn’t “real.” Fielding’s fiction, he argues, criticized the camp he labels the “extreme skeptics,” who had somehow become critical of “romance” in a way that made their writings become merely a species of an older type of romance. Ultimately, he argues that the novel came into existence “not in the isolated emergence of a great text or two, but as an experimental process consisting of many different stages” (170).

This was a difficult text for me, but one big takeaway for me is merely the witnessing of the “fights” over which narrative form was the most realistic. The squabbles happening over which genre was “best” at representing truth makes me feel that since then not much has changed: one person writes a novel, and soon after another writer writes a novel that somehow criticizes the previous for not being “real” enough but in the process executes some type of form that someone in the following generation will also find unrealistic.

Ross, Deborah L. “Introduction.” Excellence of Falsehood : Romance, Realism, and Women’s Contribution to the Novel, University Press of Kentucky, 1991. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uh/detail.action?docID=1915419.

Deborah Ross’ introduction argues that some of the debate surrounding the realistic capabilities of the “romance” vs. the realistic novel actually falls along gender lines. She writes the following:

“But this particular battle was clearly, in part, a battle of the sexes, a continued attempt to fortify serious literature against the encroachment of women’s writings, which were becoming ever more abundant and popular. When novels were the preferred form, writers such as Henry Fielding scornfully classed Eliza Haywood’s productions with French romances. And later, when romance was enjoying a new respectability, writers such as Sir Walter Scott wrote patronizingly of the “realist” Jane Austen. The need to draw and redraw lines that would keep women on the wrong side added zest to critics’ attempts to use “resemblance to truth” to separate “romance” from ‘novel'” (10).

Part of Ross’ argument, however, is that even the “realist” novels being written by men in the later part of the 18^th century were still borrowing conventions from earlier romances. And that the 18th “romances” written by women (Burney among them) held elements that were in certain ways very real and true to the people writing them.

This source, again, makes me troubled simply that we have a mode called “realism.” Is this mode more “real” than other modes of writing? I question its name.

Carnell, Rachel. “Introduction.” Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uh/detail.action?docID=308021.

Carnell in this book is analyzing Richardson, Austen, and others from a political perspective: how were their novels commenting on the political parties of the time? Her overall thesis is essentially that the political partisanship of the time “helped determine the formal structures we have come to call narrative realism” (1). A couple claims in this introduction I found pertinent to my questions about realism: that more recent scholarship of the 18^th century novel has been “cautious about focusing on formalist conventions that have been used to distinguish ‘great’ from ‘lesser’ works of literature” (1). And that what for a time was honored as the most realistic novels of the century falls not just along gender lines but also at times along political lines:

“Given the outcome of the events of 1688 and the subsequent emergence of Whig political dominance in eighteenth-century Britain, those writers handed down to us as serious, ‘realistic’ novelists have frequently been either Whig or anti-Jacobite Tory. Defoe has been admired since the early nineteenth century for his ‘natural painting.’ Fielding and Austen have been touted for their use of irony in depicting the social realities of their eras. By contrast, the narrative irony in Eliza Haywood’s late pro-Jacobite novels has rarely been mentioned by critics, and the pro-Stuart Behn is seldom considered a realist novelist, even though she employs many of the techniques associated with narrative realism in traditional scholarship” (9-10).

Borham-Puyal, Miriam. “Jemima’s Wrongs: Reading the Female Body in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Prostitute Biography.” International Journal of English Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 97–112.

In this article, Borham-Puyal focuses on Jemima’s self-narration as a moment in conversation with the genre of “prostitute’s biographies” popular among eighteenth-century audiences; she draws comparisons, particularly, with Defoe’s Moll Flanders. The inset narrative, the writer argues, allows Jemima the agency and space to frame the ways that society has both constructed her body as monstrous and forced her to act as a machine, with the first-person voice allowing her to become more than the commodity the genre typically makes its female subjects. Borham-Puyal concludes by re-stating the connection between Wollstonecraft’s narratives of entrapment and current feminist debates, highlighting a “need for feminist history to be understood as multilinear and multidirectional” (110).

Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Reading the Wound: Wollstonecraft’s ‘Wrongs of Woman, or Maria’ and Trauma Theory.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 31, no. 4, 1999, pp. 387–408.

Hoeveler uses Freud’s theory of trauma to examine the implications of the inset narratives and aborted endings in Maria. Important for this article is the discussion of character experiences and the resulting behaviors as cyclical; this is representative of the ways that trauma cannot be dismissed, and instead “lives a life of its own, twisting and turning in the victim’s psyche and on whatever page he or she attempts to compose” (402). Jemima, as a result of her traumas, becomes “as damaged and damaging as her oppressors” (395). In a testament to the “persistent power of traumatic residue,” Maria consistently “finds herself in yet another victimized situation” (399). For Hoeveler, these considerations are important in that they show us the ways that Wollstonecraft used fiction to transform her own traumas. Importantly, Hoeveler also points out that Maria’s self-narrative never reaches its intended audience; additionally, when Maria writes to speak in court, she is dismissed by the judge.

Schönfelder, Christa. “The ‘Wounded Mind’: Feminism, Trauma, and Self-Narration in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman.” Wounds and Words: Childhood and Family Trauma in Romantic and Postmodern Fiction, pp. 87–126. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013.

Central to Schönfelder’s discussion is the importance of childhood trauma, in the form of “unhealthy and destructive parent-child relationships,” to the accounts of Jemima, Darnford and Maria, with the consequences depicted as less severe in the man’s case (96). Childhood trauma, Schönfelder reads, has a formative effect that readers can trace through the novel’s numerous narratives about women’s suffering. She emphasizes the resourcefulness and resilience of characters like Maria and Jemima, and the potential of narrative to create bonds and “facilitate personal and political change” (100). The importance of narrative, here, is not simply in expression—personal therapy—but in its allowing the formation of communities; response to trauma becomes a source of (female) power. The complex and fragmentary nature of the text, however, with gaps evidence both in the novel’s structure and in its characters’ individual languages, serves as a lingering testament to the “persistent power of trauma” (120). Like Hoeveler, Schönfelder concludes that the cyclical nature of the novel’s story undercuts the potential healing power of narration.