The English Novel (I)/Longas Narrativas em Inglês - LEM2014

Dr. Bruce Stewart DLLEM / CCHLA
Reader Emeritus Literature
University of Ulster


Individual Authors

General Criticism

Introduction
The present page lists authors and critics cited in the classroom in the course of our study of the early English Novel at UFRN (CCHLA/DLLEM - Lem2014) in Winter 2018. All of the files listed here can be downloaded by clicking on the green file-extension aligned with it, whether pdf, .docx. (These are respectively Adobe and MSWord files to be viewed in the corresponding software after download.) The order of listing simply follows the chronological pace of our progress on the course Hence you will find new files being added as the course proceeds. Please let me know of about any problems and send corrections or suggestions via bstewart@ricorso.net.


Evaluations

Evaluation I
Evaluation 2
Evaluation 3
docx & pdf
docx & pdf
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[Note: All of the files listed on this webpage are formatted as Adobe .pdfs or MS Word .doc/.docx for downloading - not for page viewing on screen here (.html). Please click on each link to download the fil and then then open it in the status-bar of your browser at the bottom of your screen. You can then save them to whatever folder you like on your own computer or device. ]


Individual Authors

Daniel Defoe
Jonathan Swift
Samuel Richardson
Henry Fielding
Jane Austen
Mary Shelley
Charlotte Brontë
Emily Brontë
Charles Dickens
George Eliot
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde


[Note on file formats: MS Word documents [.doc/docx] will be downloaded when clicked. You must then save them to a folder of your own choice. Adobe Portable Document Files [.pdf] will open in the frame window of this website. You can tend download them to the folder of your choice. No all of the files on this site have been converted to PDF but this is the long-term aim since in-frame files are easier to read and easier to return to through the index. Unavailable file-types are given in plain-font only; those with files attached are given in green. Please note that it is possible to enlarge or diminish the size of the pdf files in the viewing frame of this website by holding down CTRL on the keyboard and scrolling with the mouse. BS]

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Original Works
“Colonel Jack” and “Mrs Veal”
docx & pdf
The Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719)
docx* pdf
Classroom extracts:
The Middle Station (Chap. 1)
Crusoe’s Dream (Chap. 6)
Divine Providence (Chap. 9)
Saving Man Friday (Chap. 14)
Missionary Position (Chap. 15)
Return to England (Chap. 19)
 
docx & pdf
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The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1722)
docx & pdf
Additional texts  
“The True Born Englishman” (1701)
doc & pdf
“Alexander Selkirk” - A source for Robinson Crusoe? [note by BS]
doc & pdf
Critical Views
Ian, Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957), “Robinson Crusoe: Individualism and the Novel”
docx & pdf
Terry Eagleton, Introduction to the Novel (2005) - Chap. 2: “Daniel Defoe” [chapter extract]
docx & pdf
E. A. Baker, Introduction to Moll Flanders & Lady Roxana by Daniel Defoe (1906)
docx & pdf
The Wikipedia article on Robinson Crusoe is well-worth reading - online!

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John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come (1678)
A Note on John Bunyan, by Jonathan Ben Cavalcanti Joshúa (DLLEM 2018)
docx
The English Wikipedia articles on John Bunyan and Pilgrim’s Progress are well-worth reading!
 

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Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
Original Works
Gulliver’s Travels [...] into Several Remote Nations of the World (1726) - a full-text version of the work.
doc & pdf
Classroom extracts:
Gulliver’s Travels (1726) - Book I: Voyage to Lilliput
Gulliver’s Travels (1726) - Book IV: Voyage to the Land of the Houyhnhnms
 
docx & pdf
docx & pdf
Additional texts  
Some Quotations from Jonathan Swift [classroom sheet]
Reading Gulliver’s Travels - A Classroom Selection
Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) - Intro. by Andrew Kahn(Oxford Classics)
doc & pdf
docx & pdf
doc & pdf
 
Critical Views
Terry Eagleton, Introduction to the Novel (2005) - “Jonathan Swift” [chapter extract]
Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift - The Man, His Works and the Age (1962) - chapter on Gulliver’s Travels
Critical Views - Some critical reactions to Jonathan Swift (selection)
“Jonathan Swift”, in Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, eds. Welsh & Stewart (1996)
docx & pdf
tiff [only]
doc & pdf
doc & pdf
The English Wikipedia article on Jonathan Swift and Gulliver’s Travels are well-worth reading!

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Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740)
Original Works
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740)
docx
Classroom extracts:
Letters IX-XII; XXX-XXXI [Pamela to her Parents]
First Interview with Lady Davers
Second Interview with Lady Davers
 
docx
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Additional texts  
Samuel Richardson on Marriage (Letter to The Rambler, 1751)
doc
Critical Views  
Ian Watt

“Love and the Novel: Pamela”, in The Rise of the Novel (1957), Chap. 5
“Love and the Novel: Pamela”, in The Rise of the Novel (1957) - shorter extracts

 
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Terry Eagleton

“Samuel Richardson”, in The English Novel: An Introduction (2005) [chapter extract]
“Samuel Richardson”, in The English Novel: An Introduction (2005) [shorter extracts]

Gail Bayless, “Prose and the Novel 1573-1830”, in Literary Studies, ed. R. Bradford (1996) [extract]
Patricia Spacks, “The 1740s”, in The Cambridge Companion to the English Novel, ed. Stephen Arata, et al.. (Wiley 2015)
 
 
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The English Wikipedia article on Samuel Richardson is well-worth reading!

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Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749)
Original Works
Tom Jones (1742) - a ful-text version of the novel in MSWord
docx
Classroom extracts:
from Jonathan Wild the Great (1743) - Wild woos Miss Laetitia Snap
from Tom Jones - 1: Captain Blifil Courts Bridget Allworthy
from Tom Jones - 2: Fielding Introduces Sophia in Classical style
from Tom Jones - 3: Sophia is courted by Blifil (1) and Tom Jones (2)
from Tom Jones - 4: Tom Jones’s Morality in a speech to Mr Nightingale
 
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Additional texts  
An Essay on the Knowledge of the Character of Men [1750]
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The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great (1743)
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Critical Views  
Ian Watt on Fielding - The Rise of the Novel (1957)
 
“Henry Fielding and the Epic Theory of the Novel” [Chap. 8]
“Henry Fielding as Novelist: Tom Jones” [Chap. 9]
“Henry Fielding as Novelist: Tom Jones” [Chap. 9 - classroom extract]
 
docx
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Terry Eagleton on Fielding, in The English Novel: An Introduction (2005)
  “Henry Fielding” [from “Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding”]
“Henry Fielding” [one-page classroom extract of above]
 
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The Wikipedia articles on Henry Fielding and Tom Jones are well-worth reading!

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Jane Austen, Emma (1815)
Original Works
Emma (1815) - a full-text version of the novel in MSWord
Emma (1815) - a full-text version of the novel as PDF
docx
pdf
Classroom extracts:
1: Emma and Knightley discusses Harriet Smith
2: Emma and Mr Philip Elton
3: Emma and Mr Frank Churchill
4: Emma and Knightley - the love scene
 
docx
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Additional texts  
Persuasion (1818) - a full-text version of the novel in MSWord
Persuasion (1818) - a full-text version of the novel as PDF
docx
pdf
Critical Views  
from Ian Watt on Fielding - The Rise of the Novel (1957)
 
“Realism and the Later Tradition - A Note [on Fanny Burney and Jane Austen]” [Chap. 10]
 
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Terry Eagleton on Austen, in The English Novel: An Introduction (2005)
  “Jane Austen” [from “Walter Scott and Jane Austen”]
“Jane Austen” [shorter classroom extracts]
 
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Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) - Chap. 5: “Jane Austen’s Cover Story”
Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) - extract on Emma.
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The Wikipedia articles on Jane Austen and Emma are well-worth reading!

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Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Original Works
Frankenstein (1818)- a full-text version of the novel in MSWord
docx
Classroom extracts:
1: Solitary Vices (Chap. 4)
2: The Case of Justine
3: Oedipal Dreamtime
4: Breeding Monsters
5: The Monster talks back ...
docx





Additional texts  
Mary Shelley, Prefaces to Frankenstein (1818 & 1831)
Constantin-François Volney, The Ruines of Empires (1791) - extracts
A Life of Mary Shelley - from Maryland University - “Romantic Circles”
Frankenstein: A Plot Summary - from Maryland University - “Romantic Circles” [adapted]
docx
docx
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Critical Views  
Fred Butting, ‘Frankenstein and the French Revolution’ (2000)
William Christie, ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Critical & Cultural Heritage’ (2016)
Sundry Critics on Frankenstein [extracted from William Christie, as above.)
Sundry Critics on Frankenstein [from Christie - read this here as an in-frame document]
docx
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html
Gilbert Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) Chapter 7: “Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve”
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The Wikipedia articles on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein are well-worth reading!
[ It’s worth looking at an much earlier English “monster” - Prospero’s slave Caliban in the Tempest (1611) - doc.]

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Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
[ For a close study of the reading influences on the works of Charlotte and Emily, see also The Brontes.net - online. ]
Original Works
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847), by Charlotte Brontë [edited full-text version in MSWord]
Wuthering Heights (1847), by Emily Brontë [edited full-text version in MSWord]
docx
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Classroom extract:
“I married him” - extracts on marriage in Jane Eyre
docx
Additional texts  
Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds & the drawings by Jane Eyre
Thomas Bewick‘s History of British Birds (1811) - Engravings in Bewick
“The Four Seasons: Autumn”, by James Thompson (1730) - Jane Eyre, Chap. 1
docx
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Critical Views  
Terry Eagleton, “The Brontës”, in The English Novel: An Introduction (2005) [Chap. 6]
Terry Eagleton, “The Brontës”, in op. cit. (2005) - shorter extract on Jane Eyre
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The Wikipedia articles on the Brontës and their individual novels are well-worth reading!

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Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
Original Works
Wuthering Heights (1847), by Emily Brontë [edited full-text version in MSWord]
docx
Classroom extracts:
Heathcliff or Edgar? - Catherine Earnshaw choses a husband.
“Why did you betray your heart?” - Heathcliff asks Catherine.
Nelly Dean - Narrator: A selection of passages and a commentary
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Additional texts  
Charlotte Brontë on Emily Brontë (1847 Preface to Wuthering Heights)
Charlotte Brontë on Emily Brontë (1850 Preface to Wuthering Heights)
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Critical Views  
Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) - Chap. 8: “Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell”
Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) - “Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell” [excerpts]
Terry Eagleton, “The Brontes”, in The English Novel: An Introduction (2005) [Chap. 6]
Terry Eagleton, “The Brontës”, in op. cit. (2005) - shorter extract on Wuthering Heights
Ian Ward, Law and the Brontës (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2012), “Healthcliff’s Case”
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Wuthering Heights - Introductory Note

The plot of Wuthering Heights is complicated in view of the various marriages from which the main actors are born in different generations but also because of the interchange of names - so that, for instance, Cathy Linton, being the daughter of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton, marries Linton Heathcliff, being the son of Heathcliff and Isabella Linton and, after Linton’s his death, prepares to marry Hareton Earnshaw, son of Hindley and Frances (the only bride not of the two families) who is in fact a nephew of Catherine, her own mother and sister of Hindley. This final union is regarded as the resolution of the troubles between the families triggered by Catherine’s rejection of the remorselessly jealousy Heathcliff and her marriage to Edgar Linton. Heathcliff, on his side, seeks to be revenged against Hindley, who tormented him in childhood, and against Edgar, who stole his love Catherine from him.

It is nevertheless Heathcliff and Catherine’s love for each other - foiled by her marriage for reasons of social status - which fuels the plot and provides the most dramatic moments. Between these two ill-fated lovers there is fatal bond, not merely their implacable passion for each other but a sense of reciprocal self-hood which makes them almost aspects of the same disordered personality. In Heathcliff there is the question of his mysterious origins (and equally mysterious acquisition of wealth) which brands him as an outsider who owes no debt to parents or siblings in spite of being rescued by the elder Mr Earnshaw as an infant from homelessness in Liverpool. Arguably, indeed, it is his early desertion by unknown parents that causes him to adopt a policy of remorseless vengeance when he is rejected by Catherine at her marriage to Edgar. She, on her side, is accredited by Ellen (the quasi-omniscient narrator) with a “double character” in the early scene where she wins the hearts of the Lintons while disguising her real resemblance to Heathcliff whom they despise. Later on, she reveals to Ellen that she considers her love for Edgar as a natural feeling and entirely different from her passion for Heathcliff whom she identifies as her alter ego - “I am Heathcliff“ - a passion which she compares to the “rock” that underlies the Yorkshire landscape in contradistinction from its seasonal foliage.

It is Catherine’s double character, in combination with Heathcliff’s unaccommodating feelings for her which trigger the central catastrophe of the story and which finds its clearest embodiment in the scene in Chapter XV when Healthcliff visits Catherine on her death-bed, precipitating that event through the violence of their feelings mixed of loved and hatred for one another. In such scenes the narrator wrings the last drop of emotion from the conflicting passions of the characters and does so in a manner and a degree that may leaves the reader wondering if this is the work of a naïve writer or a calculating artist. (Both of these answers may be true, in fact.) At the same time, the over-arching structure of the novel, with its pillars as the Earnshaw/Wuthering Heights and Linton/Thrushcross Grange households, creates a robust framework which the writer uses to support an edifice of symbolic, and even metaphysical, import involving ideas of endogamy and exogamy (marrying within and outside framily groups) as well as incest, sado-masochism, race and class - all of which provide the melodramatic force which propels speech after speech and episode after episode.

As the author’s sister Charlotte pointed out in a preface to the second edition (in 1845), Emily knew little of the real social life of the region outside the walls of the Anglican rectory in which the Brontë family lived, and was the least gregarious of the three literary sisters. Yet that North-Eastern region of the English midlands, with its desolated and romantic atmosphere - the “misanthropist’s heaven” of which Lockwood speaks at the outset - is very much like the blasted “heath” in Shakespeare’s King Lear on which the name of its central character is surely predicated. As such it provided her with a natural setting materials for the phantasmagoric story that she tells concerning characters who refuse to submit to the moderating influence of modern society. Wildness and savagery are the terms associated with them, along with stubbornness, caprice, and remorseless implacability. They are creatures who resist the influence and authority of civic society and answer only to the laws of nature. Indeed, “Wuthering Heights” is not alone the name of the Earnshaw dwelling and the title of the novel but, more generally, the denomination of an athmosphere world of fictional relations which is utterly distinctive and unique in English literature.

A clear account of plot, theme, and characters is given in Cliff Notes - online which, uncharacteristically, I recommend on this occasion. See also Crossref.com for a chapter-by-chapter commentary and glossary which might come in hand - also online.
[ See further note on Wuthering Heights - as attached. ]
The Wikipedia articles on Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights is well-worth reading!
There is an interesting and extensive telling of the novel and the literary life of the Brontes on the 100 Greatest Books website - online.

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Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
Original Works
Great Expectations (1847), by Charles Dickens [edited full-text version in MSWord]
docx
Classroom extract:
Great Expectations (1861) - Chap. VII: “Friends with Joe”
Great Expectations (1861) - Chap. VII: “Meet Miss Haversham”
docx
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Critical Views  
Terry Eagleton, “Charles Dickens”, in The English Novel: An Introduction (2005) [Chap. 7]
Open University Course - Humanities - English Literature - Great Expectations
Wikipedia on Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens
docx
docx
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The Wikipedia articles on the Brontës and their individual novels are well-worth reading!

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George Eliot, Mill on the Floss (1859)
Original Works
The Mill on the Floss (1859), by George Eliot [edited full-text version in MSWord]
docx
Classroom extract:
“The Ruins of the Rhône and the Rhine” - Eliot on the ‘obscure hearths’ of England
“We shall not be together” - Maggie tells Stephen that the must part (Mudport Scene).

The Catastrophe & “The Conclusion” - page copies and an illustration of the flood.

docx
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Critical Views  

Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar, remarks on The Mill on the Floss, in Madwoman in the Attic (1979)

Terry Eagleton, “George Eliot”, inThe English Novel: An Introduction (2005) [Chap. 8: George Eliot]
Terry Eagleton, remarks on The Mill on the Floss in "George Eliot" ([...] The English Novel, 2005)
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The Wikipedia articles on the “George Eliot” and The Mill on the Floss are well-worth reading!

The Mill and the Floss - Introductory Note

The Mill and the Floss (1860) is one of the all-time favourite Engish novels and the most-read of George Eliot’s works. On one level it makes a simple and compelling appeal to everyone’s understanding of children through its account of the bright little girl Maggie and her relations with her family but especially with her more stolid brother Tom Tulliver to whom she is attached in an unbreakable degree. As she grows older her intelligence leads her into company where the opportunities of life - both social and cultural - are much wider than in her own family - that of a miller father and his in-laws, a tribe of sanctimonious petty-bourgeois bullies who try to set the tone for their relations (Maggie’s aunt Mrs Glegg is a particularly tough example of this Presbyterian mindset. Pressed by the Gleggs to repay a family debt, Mr Tulliver takes on mortgages on his mill and thus puts himself in the control of a capitalist whose lawyer, Mr Wakem eventually becomes the owner of the miller. Faced with the decline in family fortunes, Tom takes employment in the mill for the new owner and eventually recovers much of their former status. Meanwhile, motivated by ideas of self-abnegation - inspired in turn by her ecstatic reading of Thomas a Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ - Maggie has formed a childhood love-bond with Philip Wakem, a crippled boy who is the son of the much-hated lawyer. Needless to say, Tom objects and ostracises Philip and heavily reproves his sister.

The next stage in her tale of growth and change brings her to the home of her cousin Lucy who is beginning to enter the sphere of upper-middle class English culture - literature and opera. In that new company of friends, Maggie meets Stephen Guest who is recognised to be Lucy’s fiancee. Stephen feels attracted to her and makes advances which she repulses with indignation, supposing that he things her less worthy of respect than her cousin. At a later point, the two are isolated on a boat trip on the river and he takes advantage of the fact to board a river cruiser bound for the estuary town of Mudport. There they spend a time together which, in the eyes of the neighbours in her native St Ogg, spells her ruination although, in fact, she leaves Stephen with weighty protestations against his treatment of her. It is nevertheless apparent, however, that they are attracted to each other and that, in him, she sees a vision of all the horizons of larger life which her narrow milieu in St. Ogg has denied her. In spite of Stephen’s letter acquitting her of blame, she now becomes the scorn of the mean-minded neighbours and even the support of the local parish Dr. Kenn cannot change their minds. He advises her to leave St Ogg and take a post as a governess elsewhere in the country.

Before she can embark on such a career - which she strenuously resists - a huge flood visits the river Floss which has flown quitely through the whole novel. In it not the only river of note since, at one point, the novelist relates her experience of sailing along the Rhone in France, with so many ruined villages on its banks, each a symbol of the vulgar lives and “obscure hearths” of England’s St. Ogg and places like it. (The passage makes a contrast between those humble homes and the Rhine-valley castles of the great German river Rhine which seem fit to be the source and origin of so many romantic and heroic tales - as in the European romantic tradition they really are.) Now the flood sweeps away trees and houses, and even the Tullivers’ mill, which stand in its way and now that great mass of the mill’s mechanical structural comes racing down on the little boat in which Maggie has rowed to saved Tom. Then, at the moment of impact, the two - brother and sister - drown together: “In their death they were not divided”.

This is, then, a narrative which recreates English rural life in the early 19th century - thirty years before the writing in the late 1850s - and thus captures the spirit of early industrialisation which was based on the mill-culture of a still earlier England. The nature of capital - how it works, how it makes fortunes and how it ruins people - is touched on but, more importantly, the status of a society which is about to rocket forward into modern times is the overall subject of the novel. Maggie is at the centre of such changes not only as a member of her lower-middle class but as a woman - or, rather, a girl, since she is 13 an infant at the start and barely 16 at the end. It also, crucially, deals with the dilemmas of family loyalty, self-sacrificing love and passionate attraction which forms the triangle of her emotional destiny and spells out her destruction. The novel is, then, both a historical portrait, capturing the very feel of an emotionally turbulent childhood, while sketching the new really of individualism with all the mental and emotional tensions that it brings. It is the description of these tension which makes George Eliot the inherently modern novelist that she is and her own experience as a female intellectual living with a married man and writing under a pseudonym confirm the authenticity of her interest in the tragic trials of Maggie Tulliver who, with Dorothea Brook in Middlemarch, is her best-known female protagonist.

BS May 2018

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Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
Original Works
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer [edited full-text version in MSWord]
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer [edited full-text version in MSWord]
docx & pdf
docx & pdf
Classroom extract:
“Whitewashing the Fence” [Chapter II]
“Kissing Becky Thatcher” [Chapter VII]
“Murder in the Graveyard” [Chapter IX]
docx & pdf
docx & pdf
docx & pdf
Critical Views  

“Tom Sawyer” and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer [adapted from Wikipedia entries on the same]

docx
The Wikipedia articles on the Mark Twain and his novels are well-worth reading!

Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Introductory Note

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Is a permanent fixture in the American imagination - and the world’s. In its portrayal of the little town of St Petersberg - named after a very big one! - it gives us an identikit of the rural American experience revolving around home, school, and courthouse, with characters such a the strict but benevolent Aunt Polly, the cruel and heartless Injun Joe and - above all - the anarchic, freebooting boy-vagrant Huck Finn who may be regarded as Tom's nativist alter ego. Like Tom, Huck is an orphan though unlike him he is entirely unshackled by the socialising process of school-lessons in which Tom - in spite of his habitually “playing hookey” - seems to do very well. Mark Twain (the nom de plume of Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910) identified the model of Tom Sawyer as a namesake in the San Francisco fire-brigade whom he knew in the 1860s, but also with several boys from his own childhood. Finally, in later years, he insisted that he was a pure projection of his own imagination yet, in a very real sense, he is a fictional version of the kind of person that Clemens really was. More than that, he captures the division between the law-abiding and God-fearing citizen, on the one hand, and the frontiersman and adventurer in the soul of every American on the other.

Tom Sawyer is completely unthinkable as a little English boy and may, for instance, be contrasted with another orphan in nineteenth-century English fiction, Pip of Great Expectations. Tom Sawyer has no expectations yet everything happens to him, including the discovering of hidden gold which is invested - in true American fashion - for his future. (This capitalist strand in the novel seems odd if not considered from the stand-point of the "Samuel Smiles" ethos of self-improvement which gives modern Americans such a strong sense of the contrast between "winners" and "losers". But the mainspring of the novel is not so much its plot - Twain warned readers of Huckleberry Finn, the 1884 sequel of the novel, of stern punishment if they went to look for one - as the spirit of the protagonists and the humour of the novelist himself. Twain rejected the idea of "improving" books and had already written satires on the good boy/bad boy theme of much children's literature of the day. In this novel the naughtiness of the hero, together with his obvious charm, is his greatest virtue. The story is told with a dead-pan wryness, an enjoyment of exaggerations, and a pervasive use of dialect in the speeches of the characters which tie it to the local and provincial mainstream of American life. In scene after scene, the narrator chivvies the reader into an attitude of kind-hearted indulgence towards the over-blown schemes of the boy-characters and then supplies a real measure of courage, ingenuity and decency in the way they extricate themselves from trouble and establish their prowess as heroes of the community.

For the critic Lionel Trilling (The Liberal Imagination, 1948), the central feature of the Twain's boyhood novels - speaking primarily of Huckleberry Finn which is told in the first person - is its truthful relation to contemporary American life embodied by its characters and, along with that, the symbolic power of the great river Mississipi which flows through it. For the international reader it must always be the sheer American-ness of the novel in which all the non-essentials of American rural life are stripped away to reveal the whole country as a playground - albeit a dangerous playground - for one of the greatest childhood creations of the Western imagination. This is not, however, to say, that it lacks for studied criticism of the usual pretensious forms of American patriotic literature in one place, or that it falls to take a stern look at the hypocrisy of American Presbyterianism which puts ethical starch into the little St Petersberg community.

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Oscar Wilde, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1875)
Original Works
The Picture of Dorian Gray [reading notes / extended quotations]
doc & pdf
Classroom extract:
“The sensuality of Dorian Gray - and his sticky end”
“Dorian Gray and Sybil Vane - a portrait of a young woman as an actress”
“Sir Henry Wooton’s theory of Life and Art”
Some Quotations (A Selection)

Aphorisms of Oscar Wilde
Opinions of Oscar Wilde
Quotations from Oscar Wilde

doc & pdf
doc & pdf
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doc & pdf
doc & pdf
Additional texts  

Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism”

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Critical Views  

xxx

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The Wikipedia articles on “Oscar Wilde” and The Picture of Dorian Gray are well-worth reading!

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Introductory Note

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Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Original Works
Dracula (1897) [full-text in Ricorso Library - Irish Classics]
html
Classroom extract:
“xxx”
Some Quotations (A Selection)

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xxx
 
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Additional texts  

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Critical Views  

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docx

Dracula - Introductory Note

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General Criticism
[ Several of the essays given here also occur under individual authors - as above. ]

E. A. Baker, Introduction to Moll Flanders & Lady Roxana by Daniel Defoe (1906)
“The English Novel” (Wikipedia & Encyc. Britannica)
John Peck, “The Studying Fiction and Prose” (1996), in R. Bradford, ed. Introducing Literary Studies (1996).
Gail Bayles, “Prose and Fiction, 1573-1830”, in R. Bradford, ed. Introducing Literary Studies (1996).
Jan Jerdrzjewski, “The Victorian Novel, 1830-1900”, in R. Bradford, ed. Introducing Literary Studies (1996).
Michael McKeon, ed., Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (2000) [anthology of criticism]
Catherine Gallagher, “Fictionality” (in Frank Moretti, The Novel, 2 Vols; Vol. 1, 2011)
Patricia Meyer Spacks, “The 1740s”, in A Companion to the English Novel, ed. Stephen Arata, et al. (2015).

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    pdf & docx*
pdf
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957) - full-text version.
docx & pdf
Individual Chapters (I. Watt)
“Realism and the Novel Form” (Chap. 1)
Robinson Crusoe: Individualism and the Novel” (Chap. 3)
“Love and the Novel: Pamela” (Chap. 5)
“Henry Fielding and the Epic Novel” (Chap. 8)
chap. 9
 
docx & pdf
docx & pdf
docx & pdf
docx & pdf
docx & pdf
Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction (2005) - Full-text version
pdf
Individual Chapters (T. Eagleton)
Chap. 1: “What is the Novel?”
Chap. 2: “Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift”
Chap. 3: “Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson”
[...]
Chap. 5: “Walter Scott and Jane Austen”
Chap. 6: “The Brontës”
Chap. 7: “Charles Dickens”
Chap. 8: “George Eliot”
 
docx & pdf
docx & pdf
docx & pdf
[...]
docx & pdf
docx & pdf
docx & pdf
docx & pdf

Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic [...]  (1979)

docx & pdf
Individual Chapters (Gilbert & Gubar)
Chap. 5: “Jane Austen’s Cover Story (and Its Secret Agents)”
Chap. 7: “Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve”
Chap. 8: “Looking Oppositely: Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell”
 
docx & pdf
docx & pdf
docx & pdf
George Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (1961; 1971 Edn.)
docx & pdf
Individual Chapters (G. Lukács)
Preface to The Theory of the Novel (1962)
docx
—, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1968)
docx & pdf
The Wikipedia article on the “English Novel” is well-worth reading!
*See also abbrevated classroom version - docx

A Note of Fictionality - by Bruce Stewart

See also ...
Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar, The Madwomen in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination (1979; new edn. 1984) - readable online.
 
Note: This immensely influential study of English fiction from a feminist standpoint is freely available in the Internet Archive in the 2nd edition of 1984 - online. It includes keynote chapters on Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, and George Eliot and is truly indispensable reading for serious studies of English literary culture and criticism.


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