7rearo20 Romance versus realism: The origin ofthe novel TLS | Essay Romance versus realism The origins of the novel July 10, 2020 htps:ww nets. co.ublaiclesromance-versus- realism foclid-IwAR2XQnICFoDizxKalniwgNZCiIKR VIM xiryallzppsdzNwKsaDyzB TBC 187rearo20 htps:ww nets. co.ublaiclesromance-versus- realism foclid-IwAR2XQnICFoDizxKalniwgNZCiIKR VIM xiryallzppsdzNwKsaDyzB TBC Romance versus realism: The origin ofthe novel “Robert Lovelace preparing to abduct Clarissa Harlow” by Francis Hayman, 1753 | © Bridgeman Images IN THIS REVIEW WITHOUT THE NOVEL Romance and the history of prose fiction 220pp. University of Virginia Press. $45. Seat lack REVISING THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL Authorship from manuscript to print 240pp. Cambridge University Press. £75. Hilary Havens PUBLIC VOWS. Fictions of marriage in the English Enlightenment ‘3808p. University of Virginia Press. $45. Molise J. Ganz THE PRINTED READER Gender, quixotism and textual bodies in eighteenth-century Britain 230pp. Bucknell University Press. Paperback, US $34.95. Amelia Dale BORN YESTERDAY Inexperience and the early realist novel 192pp. Johns Hopkins University Press. Paperback, US $29.95. Stephanie Insley Hesshinow CAPTAIN SINGLETON Edited by Manushag Powell ‘424pp. Broadview Press. Paperback, £17.50. Daniel Defoe ‘TRISTRAM SHANDY Edited by Judith Hawley 359pp. W. W. Norton. Paperback, £8.95, Laurence Sterne THADDEUS OF WARSAW Edited by Thomas McLean and Ruth Knezevich 440pp. Edinburgh University Press. £95. Jane Porter Buy Buy Buy Buy Buy Buy Buy Buy 2167rearo20 Romance versus realism: The origins of the novel ow, when and why did novels start? Conventionally, people used to say two things, in the main: that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) was a game-changer; and the novel started in the “long” eighteenth century. Only Don Quixote was published in 1605, and in critical circles Cervantes’s giant may have eclipsed Defoe’s marooned mariner as the most influential book-that-might-be-called-a-novel there has ever been. Don Quixote holds in his bony hands the “romance” stories of love and chivalry he believes in, the ones he inherits from earlier centuries; but these outré influences are vulnerable to certain corrosive satirical scepticisms based in the stony reality of the Castilian landscape. Romance, satire and realism make the novel; they are already seething nicely in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). This is, of course, to speak only of claimants to the title of the first novel in modern times - all very pliable terms by which to come to definitive conclusions about what is basically a long piece of writing that is probably a story, which isn’t true, but might be, or not. Ina thrillingly counterfactual register, Scott Black’s suggestion in Without the Novel: Romance and the history of prose fiction (University of Virginia Press. $45) is that we would be better off simply erasing the term “novel” altogether. Rather than ignoring the category of romance - “the the form and novel's guilty secret” - Black invokes a new beast altogether: history of fiction in the mode of romance”. Shuflling categories, though, as Nietzsche noticed, is a great way of learning about the category-makers rather than the objects themselves. If you hide your camel under a bush, and then cry “look, I've found a camel”, you don’t tell us what a eamal ie Rlack cansidere ctnriac hu Cervantes Hanrw Rielding Francac htps:ww nets. co.ublaiclesromance-versus- realism foclid-IwAR2XQnICFoDizxKalniwgNZCiIKR VIM xiryallzppsdzNwKsaDyzB TBC a67rearo20 Romance versus realism: The origin ofthe novel You have no more free articles available Subscribe today: only £1 a week for 12 weeks Already a subscriber? Log in here Long reads Keep reading Original poems From The Orchards By Paul Batchelor North American literature | Essay Ranging across Texas On first looking into Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove By Geoff Dyer Fssavs | Rank Review htps:hww nets. co.ublariclestromance-versus-realismy foclié-IwAR2XQnICFoDizxKaniwgNZCiIKRVIWxiryllzppsdzNwKsaDyz8B TBC 4067rearo20 Romance versus realism: The origin ofthe novel Strenuous empathy Essays on longing, looking and dwelling By Megan Marz Essays | Book Review Precision and revision Essays on the craft of writing By Elizabeth Lowry htps:ww nets. co.ublaiclesromance-versus- realism foclid-IwAR2XQnICFoDizxKalniwgNZCiIKR VIM xiryallzppsdzNwKsaDyzB TBC 567rearo20 Romance versus realism: The origin ofthe novel htps:ww nets. co.ublaiclesromance-versus- realism foclid-IwAR2XQnICFoDizxKalniwgNZCiIKR VIM xiryallzppsdzNwKsaDyzB TBC oe