The Rise of the Novel: Ballads and Broadsides

Monday, February 5, 2007

Ballads and Broadsides

In preparation for our next class on Defoe, when we'll also be reading Davis' chapters from Factual Fictions, please take the time to read over in more detail the plague ballad we examined briefly in class:

"A Recollection of the Times: or, Englands Looking-Glass"

The Davis chapters are available on Blackboard, under course documents/"origins of the novel."

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The eighteenth century is a period characterized in part by the rapid proliferation of print culture, the inauguration of "Enlightenment" thought, and the expansion of the British Empire through exploration and commerce. It is also the period during which "the novel" emerged to newly figure that changing world. Emerging from a vast crucible of other popular forms of written expression--the criminal biography, the conversion narrative, the conduct book, the romance--the novel was, first and foremost, new. As such, it posed a particular problem for early readers, writers, and thinkers; even today, scholars are still engaged in defining, redefining, and understanding the form. This seminar will take up the earliest British "novels," their contexts, and important critical thought about the form since Ian Watt's watershed The Rise of the Novel. In this course, we will not only be considering issues of form, content, and genre history; we will also be interrogating the cultural significance of a marginalized form thought to dangerously incite the imagination for early readers as well as later scholars.

The Rise of the Novel

Monday, February 5, 2007

Ballads and Broadsides

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