Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature

Liisa Steinby, Aino Mäkikalli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040786758
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays studies the encounter between allegedly ahistorical concepts of narrative and eighteenth-century literature from across Europe. At issue is the question of whether the theoretical concepts underpinning narratology are, despite their appearance of ahistorical generality, actually derived from the historical study of a particular period and type of literature. The essays take on aspects of eighteenth-century texts such as plot, genre, character, perspective, temporality, and more, coming at them from both a narratological and a historical perspective.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction The Place of Narratology in the Historical Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature
• The Eighteenth-Century Challenge to Narrative Theory
• Formalism and Historicity Reconciled in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones
• Perspective and Focalization in Eighteenth-Century Descriptions
• Temporality in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
• Temporality, Subjectivity and the Representation of Characters in the Eighteenth-Century Novel From Defoe’s Moll Flanders to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
• Authorial Narration Reconsidered Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless, Anonymous’ Charlotte Summers, and the Problem of Authority in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Novel
• Problems of Tellability in German Eighteenth-Century Criticism and Novel-Writing
• Immediacy The Function of Embedded Narratives in Wieland’s Don Sylvio
• The Tension between Idea and Narrative Form The Example as a Narrative Structure in Enlightenment Literature
• ‘Speaking Well of the Dead’ Characterization in the Early Modern Funeral Sermon
• The Use of Paratext in Popular Eighteenth-Century Biography The Case of Edmund Curll
• Peritextual Disposition in French Eighteenth-Century Narratives
• List of Abbreviations
• Index