By Fernanda Lai

Novels even in their names suggest something of the new. For Henry Fielding, an 18th century English novelist, the distinctiveness of novels lies in their ability write a timeless history of civilisation, instead of being interested in a particular historical moment. They are interested in ‘not men, but manners, not an individual but a species”. (Fielding, 32) In Evelina (1778), Burney uniquely positions her protagonist, Evelina, as the “offspring of Nature in her simplest attire” to assess the rules of London society. (Burney, 7) Since Evelina was brought up with no knowledge of the manners expected of her, her behaviour is without artifice. Evelina can be interpreted as a social experiment, as it is Evelina’s “ignorance of the forms, and inexperience in the manners, of the world, [that] occasion all the little incidents which these volumes record.” (7)

Evelina, or a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, has a remarkably tidy plot. The novel begins with Lady Howard reporting to Rev. Villars that Evelina’s maternal grandmother, Mme Dual is intent on meeting Evelina. However, years earlier, Mme. Duval disinherited Evelina’s mother, Caroline, after she rashly marries Sir John Belmont, instead of acquiescing to the match that had been planned for her. An enraged Belmont burns the marriage certificate and abandons Caroline. She later dies in childbirth, and leaves the child in the care of Rev. Villars. Thus, Evelina is born without family and legitimacy. In an attempting to keep Evelina away from Mme. Duval’s influence, Rev. Villars allows Evelina to join the Howards in London. Unfortunately, since Evelina is ignorant of the customs of London society, she makes a series of faux pas, but attracts the attention of several men in the process. The most prominent of her suitors are Lord Orville, who proves himself to be worthy of admiration, and Sir Clement Willoughby, a baronet with duplicitous intentions. After a series of events, it is revealed that her father’s absence was due to a misunderstanding, because Evelina’s former wetnurse passed her own daughter off as Belmont’s legitimate daughter.

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By Ariel Chu

In The History of Romances, Pierre Daniel Huet argues that romances obscure truth by substituting reality with dishonest, pre-modern “Fictions” (Huet, 123). Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote appears to support this claim: by criticizing a modern woman who clings to antiquated romantic conventions, The Female Quixote exemplifies Huet’s idea that a “primal” belief in romance is a hindrance to modernity. However, The Female Quixote itself uses the framework of a classic romance to convey its message, complicating Huet’s assertion that romances are inherently “dishonest” and irrational. While both Huet and The Female Quixote acknowledge the absurdity of romances, Huet’s dismissal of the genre is contradicted by The Female Quixote’s success in using a romantic framework to offer rational social commentary.

Initially, The Female Quixote seems to support Huet’s idea that romance is the discursive mode of primal, pre-modern societies. The novel’s conceit hinges upon the “foibles” of its protagonist, Arabella, a noblewoman who has been raised in rural isolation as a result of her father’s desire to abandon the city. Described as a “simple” countrywoman who disregards Christianity, Arabella can be viewed as an example of one of Huet’s “prophane,” primal individuals. Removed from urban England and the “modernity” that it symbolizes, Arabella is forced to use her library of French romances “as real Pictures of Life, from [which] she draws all her Notions and Expectations” (Lennox, 19). Just as Huet claims that fiction is the flawed method by which pre-modern societies sought to gain an understanding of the world, so Arabella treats her fictional romances as “Histories” from which she gains the idea that “Love [is] the ruling Principle of the World” (Lennox, 19). This fundamental “[addiction] to Poetry, Invention, and Fiction” (Huet, 16) accounts for Arabella’s inability to comprehend modern society in her later years, strengthening Huet’s belief that primal societies were unable to attain modernity because of their intrinsic reliance on irrational storytelling.

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By Benjamin Jones

INTRODUCTION

Reality is messy. Unfortunately, it’s not a kind of messiness that people deal well with psychologically because it’s not so much that stuff is out of its proper place so much as it is that stuff has no proper place at all. In other words: It’s not that there’s meaning out there to find, it’s that events are a gobbledegook of arbitrary chaos, which people can’t handle without feeling crazy. Human consciousness appears to be all about finding sense in the world with the end of proving to ourselves that we are rational beings, doing things for reasons and not because the world controls us and we are its sad little cogs.

It is human nature to attempt to make this chaotic mess of reality comprehensible by representing it to our own minds as something coherent — as something that would be the right material to try to read sense into in the first place. This entails imagining and inventing structures of meaning that can be superimposed upon the disorder to create a retroactive fictional order that we then get to discover, surprise (!), through our structures of meaning. My claim in this paper is that novels are one form of humans’ innate psychological desire to create order and meaning — to fictionalize and thereby retroactively construct a coherent world in which we can be rational, self-same subjects — out of the messiness of reality.

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By Jasper Burget

In his essay “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the central characteristic of the novel is its multiplicity of voices. He specifically addresses two factors in the origin of the novel: parody and linguistic diversity. He says,

The most ancient forms for representing language were organized by laughter—these were originally nothing more than the ridiculing of another’s language and another’s direct discrouse. Polyglossia and the interanimation of languages associated with it elevated these forms to a new artistic and ideological level, which made possible the genre of the novel. (51)

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By Sierra McDonald

Novels are, at their core, parodies of earlier literary genres. Parody, in a modern sense, is a way to manipulate the ideas set forth by various stories, images, or events in order to exaggerate or critique them, generally through humor or simply for comic effect. Thus, it may feel strange for many modern readers to consider most novels parodies, since they are not as obviously ironic or silly as things like SNL or the Scary Movie franchise or this. Yet, novels are characterized as parodies in M.M. Bakhtin’s book The Dialogic Imagination. According to Bakhtin, novels take other genres and put them into a more realistic space.¹ Novelists take characters, settings, or situations that are familiar tropes from other, earlier literary genres (the epic, the romance, the legend, etc.) and force them to interact with modernity, which serves to show the inadequacies inherent in older literary forms, since such characters are not prepared or designed to step into the modern versions of their respective identities. Novels thus simultaneously parody earlier forms of literature and critique their own modernity.

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