The Age of Enlightenment and the shaping of the English novel

Enlightenment is a term originally taken from the German Aufklaerung, it is generally used to describe the philosophic, scientific, and rational spirit, the freedom from superstition, the skepticism and faith in religious tolerance of much of the 18th-century Europe. The ancestors of the movement were Descartes, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Newton. Voltaire and Rousseau, et al were associated with the Enlightenment in the minds of English readers, together with its great monument L’Encyclopédie. (See a story about Catherine the Great inviting Denis Diderot, one of the founders of the project, to St Petersburg in the 1770s, with the aim to produce the Russian analogue of the French Encyclopaedia. Another example of the its influence is the work of Thomas Paine, who a wrote a book The Rights of Man and took part in the drawing up of the American Declaration of Independence of 1773.

On a more literary level some scholars, including myself, see a connection between the philosophy of Enlightenment, the growth of literary realism, and the rise of the novel.

The greatest English novelists of the Enlightenment age are

Daniel Defoe (son of James Foe), author of 560 books, pamphlets, journals, also Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), Roxana (1724), etc.;

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), with his 4-part Gulliver’s Travels;

Henry Fielding (1707-1754), the author of the highly innovative novel Tom Jones a Foundling (1749);

Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768), the author of the novels Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy the Gentleman (1761-1767), and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768);

Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774), author of The Vicar of Wakefield (1766);

Robert Bage (1728-1804), author of two novels Hermsprong, or a Man as He is Not (1796);

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), author of the novel Mary (1788) and the treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792);

Jane Austen (1775-1817), author of several novels Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey (1818) and Persuasion (1818).

The Enlightenment in literature had two stages in its development: the period from the early 18th century to c. 1750-60s, when the writers would explore the social and individual activities and potential of man in terms of their belief in common sense. Robinson Crusoe is a fine example of a novel exploring the almost infinite practical and rational possibilities of a human being. The second period covers the 1760 and 1780s, when a new generation of writers would stress the emotional aspect of man’s or woman’s behavior, thus reinterpreting one of the key ideas of the Enlightenment that is the belief in the potency of the human mind and common sense. The second stage gave birth to Sentimentalism (the term originates from Lawrence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy).

I. Daniel Defoe as a founder of the English Enlightenment novel

II. Swift as a founder of dystopia in English literature

III. Henry Fielding’s innovations in the novel: His concept of the comic epic

IV. Lawrence Sterne as a founder of sentimentalism and a forefather of the psychological novel

V. ‘Scriptible/writerly’ and ‘lisible/readerly’ types of novel (R.Barthes) in Jane Austen’s fiction