By Terry Eagleton
Publish yr note: First released in 2004
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Written through one of many world's best literary theorists, this e-book offers a wide-ranging, available and funny advent to the English novel from Daniel Defoe to the current day.
Covers the works of significant authors, together with Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce. Distils the necessities of the idea of the unconventional.
Follows the version of Eagleton's highly renowned Literary idea: An Introduction (Second variation, 1996).
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Additional resources for The English Novel: An Introduction
Example text
Indeed, it lays bare an embarrassing contradiction at the very heart of that order. If middle-class society holds the autonomous self so dear in theory, how come that it violates it so often in practice? Does it really desire independence for its servants, wage-slaves and colonial peoples? Wouldn’t you secretly prefer to have absolute freedom of action yourself, while denying it to your competitors in the marketplace? Middle-class society believes in the self-government of the people; but it is also a place where men and women seem to be little more than playthings of impersonal economic forces.
Nature is no longer an open book, but an obscure text to be deciphered with difficulty. The Protestant gropes anxiously in darkness for ambiguous signs of his or her salvation. Yet the whole point of a secularized universe would seem to be its contingency – the fact that nothing in it is actually ‘meant’. An author like Henry Fielding uses the formal design of the novel itself to imply a pattern in events; but the result, as we have seen, is an ironic gap between the events and the pattern. All one now seems to be left with is secular experience – whatever one can taste, feel and weigh; yet it is in this unpromising domain that one must search for symptoms of salvation.
Like a good many major English novelists, as we shall see later, he was lower middle class or petty bourgeois in status, in tune with the common people yet more educated, aspiring and politically articulate. In his Journal of the Plague Year he scoffs at some popular superstitions but gives credence to others. Like many of those who sprang from this most politically nonconformist of social classes (one thinks of William Blake), he was a political maverick who affirmed the radical equality of men and women, maintaining that it was pure social convention which held women back.