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4: Neoclassicism and the Eighteenth Century (1660 -1697)
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4.1: Introduction
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The novel was only one new kind of writing that developed throughout this century; others included the periodical essay and the mock-heroic/anti-epic. After the Glorious Revolution, certain changes occurred in audience, in the reading public. Writers could now express diverse points of view and opinions independent of high-born and wealthy patrons, and ranging between parties; they could explore individual psychology, consciousness, and conscience.
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4.2: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (excerpt)
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Aphra Behn was the first commercially successful woman writer in England in the seventeenth century, writing in various genres, including drama, prose, and poetry. She wrote many kinds of prose, including the prose “history” of Oroonoko: Or, The History of the Royal Slave. Like many early novels, this work hybridizes various discourses and forms, including idealism and realism, and the travelogue, romance, and tragedy. Her prose contributed to the development of the novel as genre in English.
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4.3: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (excerpt)
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Daniel Defoe was born to James Foe, a tallow chandler and “auditor for the Butcher’s Company,” and Alice, who died when Daniel was eight. He changed his name to Defoe in 1695. Once he turned to writing, he wrote a number of propagandist pieces, including the parodic The Shortest Way with Dissenters. This oblique attack on the Tories caused Defoe to be arrested, convicted of seditious libel, and sentenced to jail. In 1730, he left home to hide from a creditor and died alone in a rented room.
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4.4: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (excerpt)
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Born in Dublin, Jonathan Swift depended on the generosity of his uncle for both his upbringing and education. He studied at Kilkenny School and then at Trinity College, Dublin, from which he graduated in 1689. His Gulliver’s Travels (1726) vilified humankind for its misdirected pride and various atrocities against humanity. The force, range, and bitterness of this text’s indictment against humans who wrongly assume their own rationality strike home even today.
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4.5: Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (excerpt)
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Henry Fielding was a strong student of the classics at Eton. This scholarship would later give design to his novels, works he first described as “comic prose epics,” that is, hybrids that openly declared their artfulness. He developed these strengths further in his comic novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749). Fielding himself appears as a character in these works; in Joseph Andrews, he clearly identifies himself as the creator of fiction in order to reveal Truth.