Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hershinow, Stephanie Insley

Titel

The novel and the novice: Eighteenth-century narratives of inexperience

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• "The Novel and the Novice: Eighteenth-Century Narratives of Inexperience" is a study of the early novel in Britain during the second half of the eighteenth century; in it, I focus on the concept of inexperience and particularly on characters who can be understood as avoiding or even resisting experience of the world. I examine what this pattern of sustained inexperience reveals about the values of this cultural moment, but I am also interested in narrative forms that do not resolve inexperience into experience. Scholarship on the early novel since at least Ian Watt has focused on the centrality of empiricism to Enlightenment philosophy and has, by extension, considered the representation of experience as central to the development of the novel: how experience shapes our understanding of the world, how experience changes us, and what experiences come to matter and why. But because of this focus, critics have at times neglected the centrality of a cluster of concepts that can seem antithetical to those interests: concepts like inexperience, naïveté, ignorance, and innocence. Rather than thinking about how the seeds of the Bildungsroman are present in early novels, I consider novels that privilege not character development but character integrity. I attend to the novel as a form, but one that we can understand, in the examples I consider, as curiously formless. In other words, I want to question the too-easy alignment of the novel form with a privileging of formation, a confusion of Bild with Bildung. The authors I consider—Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, and Ann Radcliffe—insist that certain characters don't require shaping, and indeed suggest the possibility of innate moral intelligence, a capacity for goodness that does not come from knowledge of the world and that may, in fact, be threatened by it. Rather than understanding this effort as merely consolidating a series of moral exempla, which is how we tend to understand the early novel's didacticism, I see these characters as figuring most urgently the early novel's reflection on its own procedures, its understanding of how the genre itself encounters the world.