III.

18th Century: The Rise of the Novel

As the novel became increasingly popular during the 18th century, writers examined society with greater depth and breadth, writing revealingly about people living within, or escaping from, the pressures of society. Criticism was implicit of characters attempting to ignore society and its conventions, and of society for failing to satisfy human aspirations.

A.

The British Masters

Five figures in the 18th century—Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne—created the first classic British novels, setting high standards and models for later work in this genre. In Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-1748), written in the form of letters exchanged between lovers, friends, and kinsmen, Richardson brought to a traditional theme of the older romances—a young woman's defence of her chastity—a psychological realism rarely surpassed. Fielding, in Joseph Andrews (1742), Tom Jones (1749), and Amelia (1751), depicts contemporary life and morals with generosity combined with great classical learning, enabling him to achieve what he called “comic epic”. Smollett's Roderick Random (1748) follows a picaresque hero against a vivid panorama of lower-class society. His The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) is gentler in its social criticism, but the comedy is merciless in its depiction of human foibles and vanities. Between 1759 and 1767 Sterne turned the novel inside out with his comic masterpiece The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in which the hero, who is the narrator, is not born until halfway through the book. Sterne had no real successors until James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who investigated the relations between life on the one hand and literature and language on the other.

B.

Development of Genres

Many categories of the novel became recognizable in the 18th century, although they were rarely self-contained or mutually exclusive. One was the didactic novel, in which theories of education and politics were expressed. Most famous was Émile (1762; trans. 1763) by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A British didactic novel was Caleb Williams (1794), by the political philosopher William Godwin; this work may also be regarded as exhibiting aspects of the Gothic novel, in which the element of horror is created by the use of apparitions, supernatural manifestations, dungeons, tombs, and nature in its more terrifying aspects. The first truly Gothic novel was The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole. Later examples are The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe, The Monk (1796) by Matthew Lewis, and Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) was the first American Gothic novel. The Gothic strain has been potent in fiction ever since.

An enduring sub-genre of the British novel—although uncommon in American fiction—is the comedy of manners, which is concerned with the clash, mirrored in speech and behaviour, between characters formed by particular cultural and social conditions. Perhaps the first such writer was Fanny Burney (Evelina, 1778; Cecilia, 1782), but the great exemplar was Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Emma, 1816). Her abiding theme is ostensibly that of young women securing, or not securing, husbands; her underlying serious concern is with the attainment of self-knowledge. Such are Austen's wit, irony, and psychological perception, allied with her strict sense of correct social behaviour, that she is the unchallenged genius of the genre.