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Introduction to the Critical and
Scholarly Discussion of Literature, Part 1
Lecture Basismodul 1, November 20, 2007

1. Received notions on “The Rise of the Novel”: The (modern) novel began with Robinson Crusoe (1719)
2. Second thoughts: We had “novels” before and Robinson Crusoe was not perceived as a “novel”
3. More complex or differentiated perspectives: “The Rise of the Novel” is a plotline we have rewritten again and again
4. Consequences:

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The history of prose fiction as Pierre Daniel Huet wrote it in 1670

• offered a story of diverse beginnings — we create fictions
• escalating into erroneous notions of reality where we lack true knowledge — as did the Northern people of the early middle ages when they wrote the Arthurian romances
• in cultures of oppulence in order to wet our appetites for further luxuries — as did the ancient Asian cultures with their stories of sexual desires
• to prevent others from accessing the truth — as did the Egyptian priests when they translated their secret knowledge into histories of mysteries only they would be able to interpret correctly
• to spread the complex truth in a more simple form — as Jesus did wherever he spoke in similes
• to divert ourselves where true histories become tedious
• to instruct others — e.g. the female readers of love stories how to protect their virtue against the assaults of men
• offered one big international history of fictions
• which spread through translations from culture to culture
• which created “streams” of traditions

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Diverse beginnings of the English novel could be

• Beowulf (750/1010) an Anglo Saxon epic taking the step into the Christian world
• “Saint’s Lives” [link] — collections of (more or less fictional) biographies
• (Fictitious) travelouges like The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Knight (c. 1370) [link]
• (Fictitious) histories like Malory’s Le More Darthur (1471/ 1485) [link]
• Romances like Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c.1380) [link]
• Collections of tales, novels, novellas like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1386-1400) [link]

• Though we can offer numerous origins there is a tendency to write a much shorter history — see the article “Novel” as it could be found on www.en.wikipedia.org till 12:57, 10 August 2005 [link]

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Geoffrey Chaucer giving a reading his Troilus and Criseyde to a courtly audience

Some general thoughts on prose fiction

• spread with the cultural practice of silent — lonely and individual — reading
• needed paper as a medium to allow the coincidental text
• needed the printed book to address the individual consumer
• afforded a legitimation of fictional history in opposition to true history
• invited a debate of poetics which coulfd legitimise a high, heroic fictional history and a low comical
• allowed a second debate of legitimation the exemplary story could offer

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1
Received notions: The (modern) novel began with Robinson Crusoe (1719) — Ian Watt claimed in in his book The Rise of the Novel in 1957:

• that Robinson Crusoe was the first (modern) “novel” as it departed from the beaten path of French (baroque) “romances” marked by
• lofty ideals
• acts of incredible heroism performed by prices and princesses
• tedious bombast descriptions
• never ending quests of adventures which would fill volume after volume
• that Robinson Crusoe was the first (modern) “novel” as it first developed our modern art of realism
• the world of a normal (middle class) English man bearing a normal potentially real name
• the world of (early) modern capitalism
• a text a normal man could have written

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1.1
The first modern “novels” were according to Watt:

• Daniel DeFoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
• Daniel DeFoe, Moll Flanders (1722)
• Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740)
• Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742).
• Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1748)
• Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749)
• ...
• lead to the English novels of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and George Eliot
• lead to a development in which the English novel became the ancestor of all the modern novels written by the world’s leading authors from Balzac, Zola, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky to Thomas Mann.

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1.2 On Robinson Crusoe
The sucess on the book market

• vol. 1: 25 Apr. 1719
• succeeding editions: 2nd: 12. May 1719 — 3rd: 6 June 1719 — 4th: 8 Aug. 1719 — 5th: autumn 1720
• vol. 2: 20 Aug. 1719
• succeeding editions: 2nd: Dec. 1719 — 3rd 1722
• vol. 3: 6 Aug. 1720
• again several succeeding editions - mostly in sets of all 3 volumes
• Piracies
• Dublin piracy:1 June 1719 — Amsterdam Cofee House Edition: 1 Aug. 1719 — 0-Edition: c. Sept. 1719 — Dublin piracy of vol.2: Autumn 1719
• Newspaper edition
• The Original London Post, or Heathcot's Intelligence vol. 1: 7 Oct. 1719 - 30 March 1720. — vol. 2: 1 Apr. 1720 - 18 Oct. 1720
• Translations: French, German, Dutch...
• Imitations

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1.3 On Robinson Crusoe:
Preface with spelling mistakes: extremely hasty work

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1.4 On Robinson Crusoe:
The blank on page 46, repeated in later editions — indeed extremely hasty work

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1.5On Robinson Crusoe:
Piracies: Haste was necessary

the first edition, frontispiece + title page: 5 shillings

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the first piracy: 2 shillings

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A 1720s chap book edition: all three volumes with wood cuts

 

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1.6 On Robinson Crusoe:
The 1719 Newspaper edition — DeFoe and Taylor in a move against their competitors?

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1.7 On Robinson Crusoe:
The French translation, images of the Amsterdam 1726/27 edition — the story

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1.8 On Robinson Crusoe:
Imitations — indeed a book which inspired a development

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1.9 On Robinson Crusoe:
The story: a conventional arrangement of two courses of adventures

• Conflict with father and first voyage
• Secured his living and yet: second voyage, island plot
• Return home

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1.10 On Robinson Crusoe:
p.1-2: Beginning - Conflict with his Father: An allegorical story of the lost son?

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1.11 On Robinson Crusoe:
p.42: Money and “real” life — an intretesting connection between the accquisition of wealth and spiritual progress

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1.12 On Robinson Crusoe:
p.243-44: Friday — a story of European chauvinism?

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2
Second thoughts

2.1
Robinson Crusoe — the first (modern) novel?
“Novels” existed before 1719

• — Term Catalogue, Easter 1692 [link]
• “Literature”, fiction has not got a category of its own
• “novels” and dubiuos histories in the field of true histories
• “plays” and “poems” have their own category

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2.2
“Novels” existed — William Congreve, Incognita (1692)

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2.3
“Novels” existed — Aphra Behn, Novels (1700)

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2.4
“Novels” existed — read the (stolen) Queen Zarah preface published in 1705 [link]

• the text was originally published anonymously in French in 1683, pirated and authorised by the French Abbe Bellegarde in 1702, translated into English in 1705 and deals explicitly with the rise of the “novel” and the defeat of the old “romance” — as a 17th century development
• “Novels” were short stories
• of secret plans, “intrigues”
• which did not succeed as planned — due to the interference of others
• which called for intense character descriptions
• which ended in a surprising point
• which taught through realistic examples of what can happen
• which had a history from the stories of Boccacce and Chaucer to Cervantes Novelas Exemplares (1613) and Marie de LaFayette’s Princesse de Cleves (1678)
• “Romances” were long stories
• of adventures
• of either heroic or satirical heroes
• which taught as they inspired emulation or as they evoked laughter

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2.5
“Robinson Crusoe” saw his own book read as a romance — so the preface of his third volume

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2.6
Robinson Crusoe was rather perceived as a “romance” — Eliza Haywood’s “new romance” Exilius (1715)

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2.7
Robinson Crusoe was rather perceived as a “romance” — showing much of the design on the most famous modern “romance” Telemachus

François Fénelon, Telemachus (London: E. Curll, 1715)	Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (London: W. Taylor, 1719)

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2.7
Prose fictions — located in the field of histories. Robinson Crusoe allegedly a true private history, yet possibly feigned, invented, sheer “romance”

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3
More complex or differentiated perspectives

3.1
“The Rise of the Novel” is a plotline we have rewritten again and again

• Version 1: The “The Rise of the Novel” was the rise of the European exemplary short story, “novel”, “novella” or “tale” which defeated the longer epic “romance”
• ...a European development which found its key moments in Cervantes’ Novelas Exemplares (1613), the “novels” of Scarron’s Roman Comique (1651), Marie de LaFayette’s Zayde (1670), her Princesse de Cleves (1678), Aphra Behn’s Novels of the 1680s and 1690s, and a scandalous Francophone Dutch production of short and scandalous histories imported and imitated all over Europe.
• ...a European development levelled against the the Arthurian epic and its sucessor the Amadis — made fun of by Cervantes with his Don Quixote (1605/15)
• Version 2 (Ian Watt’s version): The first real “novel” was Robinson Crusoe — he defeated the French baroque Romance written by Madleine de Scudéry and Marie de LaFayette
• Version 3: The modern novel (as we find it in DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe) had precursors in a series of “proto novels” witten by female authors from Aphra Behn to Delarivier Manley

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3.2
The different versions of the “The Rise of the Novel”

• share the “novel”/“romance” bipolarity
• yet they place different texts under the existing categories
• have different advantages
• version 1 justified the European (sacandalous) short story
• version 2 turned Robinson Crusoe into the first modern novel and created a new history of English literature in which the enlightened English modern novel defeated the French baroque romance
• version 3 deposed Daniel DeFoe as the “father” of the modern novel, moved our attention to neglected female authors of the 1680s to 1720s and turned them into “mothers of the modern novel”

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4
Consequences

• all three versions are true
• you define what you consider to be a novel or a romance and they turn true
• you pursue different targets with each version

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