18th century in literature  

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Literature of the 18th century refers to world literature produced during the 18th century. The 18th century saw the development of the modern novel as literary genre, in fact many candidates for the first novel in English date from this period. Subgenres of the novel during the 18th century were the epistolary novel, the sentimental novel, "histories", the gothic novel and the libertine novel. 18th Century Europe started in the Age of Enlightenment and gradually moved towards Romanticism. In the visual arts, it was the period of Neoclassicism.

Although the modern novel as literary genre solidified, literacy rates were still very low as there was no primary education for the common man. As Resa L. Dudovitz notes in The Myth of Superwoman : Women's Bestsellers in France and the United States "a novel which sold well in the eighteenth century - and even the most successful book rarely sold more than a few thousand copies - did so within a fairly closed circle of readers, many of whom as writers also participated in deciding the prevailing criteria of literary excellence, [...], by the mid-nineteenth century cheaper editions and improved access to reading material through subscriptions and in France, through reading rooms, pushed sales of a popular novel as high as 10,000 copies. Although critics continued to function as the arbiters of taste, the critical elite could no longer claim literature to be their exclusive property." -- page 22.

The English novel became a popular form in the 18th century, with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740). Another very popular form was the Gothic novel (The Castle of Otranto, 1764) and its European equivalents the roman noir in France and the Schauerroman in Germany.

Early European bestsellers were Julie, or the New Heloise by Rousseau and The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe.

There was already literature of subversion such as that from Voltaire and Sade and other libertine writers. In the United Kingdom there was the renegade publisher William Dugdale known for his radical pamphlets and bawdy books.

A good introduction to this period, one which describes the popular literature of that era in France very well, is The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France.

Contents

Genres

amatory fiction - adventure novel - epistolary novel - gothic novel - "histories" - libertine novel - sentimental novel

Publishers

Edmund Curll


Background

enlightenment - Neoclassicism - French Revolution


Authors

Abbé Prévost - William Blake - Restif de la Bretonne - Casanova - John Cleland - Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon - Daniel Defoe - Marquis de Sade - Denis Diderot - David Hume - Immanuel Kant - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos - Delarivier Manley - André de Nerciat - Ann Radcliffe - Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Jonathan Swift - Giambattista Vico - Voltaire - Horace Walpole - Mary Wollstonecraft

Titles

Robinson Crusoe (1719) - Pamela (1740) - Dom Bougre (1741) - Le Sopha, conte moral (1742) - Thérèse Philosophe (1748) - Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748) - Fanny Hill (1750) - Tristram Shandy (1760-1770) - The Castle of Otranto (1765) - Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) - The 120 Days of Sodom (1785) - The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) - La Religieuse (1796) - The Monk (1796) - L'Histoire de Juliette (1797)






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