Eighteenth Century Fiction, vol. 21, no 2 (hiver 2008-2009)

Eighteenth Century Fiction publishes articles in both English and French on all aspects of imaginative prose in the period 1700–1800, but will also examine papers on late 17th-century or early 19th-century fiction, particularly when the works are discussed in connection with the eighteenth century.

Vol. 21, no 2 (hiver 2008-2009)

University of Toronto Press

Joseph Drury
Haywood's Thinking Machines
A number of scholars have argued in recent years that the characters in Haywood's early fiction do not conform to modern notions of subjectivity. For William Warner, the "shell-like emptiness" of protagonists "defined less by anything they bring to the narrative before their appearance in it than by their position in the plot" stems from Haywood's participation in a new "media culture" that drives her to abstract and simplify the novel of amorous intrigue into an "entertainment machine" available for "potentially endless repetition on the market."1 Jonathan Kramnick broadly endorses Warner's revisionist account of the rise of the novel, which finds "the dissolution of the subject precisely when we are to expect its genesis," but explains the peculiarities of Haywood's fiction by suggesting that, in depicting consciousness in the early eighteenth century, "Haywood inherited a category very much in flux." As a result, the traditional Lockean model of the mind as a single coherent identity isolated from its material environment does... (Extrait)

Lee F. Kahan
Fathoming Intelligence: The "Impartial" Novelist and the Passion for News in Tobias Smollett's Ferdinand Count Fathom
Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) occupies a place in the history of the novel chiefly because of the extended definition of the genre that the author provides in his preface to the work: "A Novel is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of an uniform plan ... to which every individual figure is subservient. But this plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability or success, without a principle personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene by virtue of his own importance."1 As John Barrell has astutely demonstrated, this definition is consistent with Smollett's narrative practice in novels such as... (Extrait)

William H. Wandless
Secretaries of the Interior: Narratorial Collaboration in Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall
At the end of Sarah Scott's A Description of Millenium Hall (1762), the anonymous narrator offers an apology to his unnamed friend in the publishing business, a correspondent to whom he has directed "a very circumstantial account" of the illuminating experiences that attended the breakdown of his chaise in Cornwall.1 Moved to prolixity by the enlightened society he encountered during his excursion, he expresses half-hearted regret that he "could not restrain [his] pen within moderate bounds" (249); inspired by the myriad merits of his subject, the force of his impressions overwhelmed his sense of epistolary propriety. This willingness to take liberties with the patience of his friend, however, stands opposed to the nice circumspection that the narrator observes in his decorous dealings with the women of the Hall: only an awareness voiced in the penultimate paragraph, that he and his travelling... (Extrait)

Youmna Charara
Pensée morale et transformations génériques dans Paul et Virginie
Les oeuvres fictionnelles de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre sont toutes expressément mises au service de vérités philosophiques ou morales. Cette utilisation de la fiction à des fins non littéraires peut paraître convenue, historiquement datée, incompatible avec la sensibilité anti-didactique du lecteur moderne. Elle produit pourtant des effets proprement littéraires, qui éclairent la composition de l'oeuvre de Bernardin. D'une part, la fiction pédagogique entre en relation avec des fictions du même type, ou avec des textes d'idées; Paul et Virginie, notamment, est redevable d'une bonne part de sa cohérence idéologique aux études de la nature, véritable matrice intellectuelle; le roman garde la trace d'une pensée spéculative qui s'est élaborée ailleurs et qu'il s'emploie à expérimenter, ajuster, ou remodeler. D'autre part, l'intervention d'un intertexte philosophique modifie les structures de la fiction pastorale dont hérite Paul et Virginie, et apparaît comme le moyen d'une... (Extrait)