THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL and DANIEL DEFOE

The communication situation in prose texts comprises three

levels:
1. A character addresses another character in the
narrative; (Moll Flanders is talking to her husband)
2. This is narrated but a narrator who sometimes
addresses an imaginary dear reader, the narrate;
3. The text has been composed at a real author and is
read by actual reader.

The concern of the Augustan age (a term derived from the period of literary eminence under the Roman
emperor Augustus and generally taken to refer to the early to mid-eighteenth century) was not so much
with exploration as with experience. The novel and fiction became the dominant from and genre in terms
of readership, although for more than a century they would be considered “inferior” by critics. The novel
was not a sudden innovation at the end of the seventeenth century. Accounts of travels, which may or may
not have been fictionalised to some extent, go back as far as the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, probably
published in 1375. Other worlds and cultures, ways of living and believing, became a main characteristic of
fiction through the Elizabethan age. Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) provides us with one
of the earliest picaresque tales in English. It recounts “the life of Jack Wilton” in a mixture of styles,
anticipating the picaresque heroes and heroines of Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding just over a century
later. In general, however, the exotic influence in seventeenth and eighteenth-century literature was to be
tamed (=addomesticata); subsumed into recognisably English middle-class ways of thinking and brought
into line with the worldview of the time. Englishness could always dominate over exoticism: English
readers could usually feel they were superior to any of the outlandish behaviour or ways of life they read
about.

IAN WATT identifies the novel proper with the literary techniques he calls “formal realism”. In terms of
the history of thought, “formal realism” is the literary equivalent of what he calls the “realist” philosophy
of Descartes and Locke, with their emphasis on particulars as the basis of knowledge, and the source of all
abstract or general ideas, and on knowledge as growing from our individual experience of specific times
and places, rather than by authorities or by abstract principles derived a priori.
Watt saw formal realism, especially that of Defoe, as going hand in hand with a belief in individualism, in
the sense that the individual is viewed as able to define and master his or her own fate, rather than having
to find a role relative to a group or hieratic system of authority. This belief Watt identifies with the social
movements favouring Protestantism and capitalism.

WILLIAM CONGREVE, INCOGNITA 1691

“Novel are a more familiar nature; come near us, and represent to us Intrigues in practice, delight us with
Accidents and odd Events, but not such as are wholly unusual and unpresidented, such which not being so
distant from our Belief bring also the pleasure nearer us. Romance give more of Wonder, and deal for what
is not believable, Novel more Delight”
ROMANCE: is a prose or verse narration whose usual elements frequently include the quest, the
complications of love and desire, a strict chivalric code of conduct, the idea of the protagonist as a “Fair
Unknown” who seeks his own identity, the emphasis on wonder, magic and the supernatural, the recurrent
removal of the action from the specific demands of time and space, the intricate interlacing of narrative
strands.
The term NOVEL did not come into general use until late 18 th century following the critical distinction of
Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785).

1
The ROMANCE is an heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and things. The NOVEL is a picture of
real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written. The Romance, in lofty and elevated language,
describes what never happened nor is likely to happen. The novel gives a familiar relation of such things as
pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it
is to represent every scene in so easy and natural a manner, and to make them appear so probable, as to
deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys
or distresses of the persons in the story as if they were our own.
Novel is a convenient label, and tell much more about our own. Novel are also called history, romance,
true history, secret history, and they could talk about secrets, memoirs, adventures, life, expedition,
fortune and misfortune, and more.
Enter a narrative situation where a boundaries between the ordinary and everyday facts and event and the
fictional or sensational are fluid.
What characterized the fundamental characteristic of the novel is sort of angry for actuality and belief that
the actual is separable category, separable from it is typical.
David Hume’s (philosopher) evocation of what the reader of a true history does with that feeling of the
truth of the tale is a good rendition of what the realistic novel claims to induce in its readers.
The impression is not a fiction but a reality of something which is familiar, local and near to us.

THE EARLY BRITISH NOVEL

What is unprecedented about the novel as it emerges in Britain and in the rest of Western Europe in these
early modern European centuries is that it very aggressively and insistently seeks to restrict meaningful,
significant, and serious narrative to the actual and familiar world of more or less daily experience and to
banish or trivialize the older and manifestly unrealistic genres of epic and romance. In this news set of
attitudes to narrative, romance and epic are branded as preposterous and irrelevant in their unreality, in
their distance from the everyday world and experience of most readers. For the novel, the ordinary and
the specifically and concretely experiential (along with the everyday language specific to that realm) come
in this new world of narrative to define the absolute boundaries or limits of reality and by extension of
moral significance. The novel rends to validate the perspective of the newly conceptualized modern
individual, whose particularized and personalized view of the world is explored as if it were somehow prior
to a communal or social world. The world represented by the new novelistic narrative is not an inert and
objective mass somehow out there beyond human experience; the reality the novel tends to deliver is,
rather, a record of the productive interaction between a worlds of facts and heroic individuals who give it
shape and meaning.

In prose fiction are not real adventure.

- Narrated material is the product of a selection made by the author who gets rid of any fantastic or
incredible events, maintaining possible (credible) ones only;
- These events are narrated in a sequence, following a chronological order;
- The credibility is enhanced by relying on narrative models such as letters, diaries, authobiography;
- The narrator is generally homodiegetic ( a narrator who is also a character in the story) or
heterodiegetic ( a narrator who is not a character in the story but in a way hovers above it and knows
everything about it)
- The narrated material is included in a paratextual frame (introduced by an editor who “certifies” its
authenticity)
- The narrator often underlines his/her enunciation by emphasizing the “presentness” of the narration
- Inclusion of authenticity clues or eyewitness pieces of evidence.

THE NARRATOR AND ITS FUNCTIONS

1. The narrative function: the narrative function is a fundamental one. Any time we have a narrative,
this role is assumed by the narrator, whether present in the text or not (M.F. the narrator is the
protagonist)

2
 2. The directing (metanarrative) function: the narrator performs a directing function when hr
interrupts the story to comment on the organization or articulation of his text
3. The function of communiucation: the narrator addresses the narrate directly (that is, the text’s
potential reader) in order to establish or maintain contact with him or her
4. The testimonial function: the narrator affirms the truth of his story, the degree of precision in his
narration, his certainty regarding the events, his sources of information, and the like. This function
also comes into play when the narrator expresses his emotions about the story, that is the affective
relation he has with it.
5. The ideological

THE NARRATIVE INSTANCE

The narrative instance is said to be the conjunction of:
1. Narrative voice (who is speaking?)
2. Time of the narration (when does the telling occur, relative to the story?)
3. Narrative perspective (through whom are we perceiving?)

THE NARRATIVE VOICE:

We will therefore distinguish here two types of narrative: one with the narrator absent from the story he
tells, the other with the narrator present as a character in the story he tells, I call the first type, for obvious
reasons, heterodigetic, and the second type homodiegetic.

NARRATIVE LEVELS

Different levels of OMODIEGETIC AND

ALLODIEGETIC

THE NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE:

Genette distinguishes 3 kinds of focalization:
1. ZERO FOCALIZATION: the narrator knows more than the characters. He may know the facts about
all of the protagonists as well as their thoughts and gestures. This is the traditional “omniscient
narrator”.
2. INTERNAL FOCALIZATION: the narrator knows as much as the focal character. This character filters
the information provided to the reader. He cannot report the thoughts of other characters.
3. EXTERNAL FOCALIZATION: the narrator knows less than the characters. He acts a bit like a camera
lens, following the protagonists’ actions and gestures from the outside; he is unable to guess their
thoughts.