The History, from 1700 to 1800, of English Criticism of Prose Fiction |
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Addison Adventures amusement appeared attitude Beattie Castle of Otranto censured Cervantes chapter characters Charles Jenner Clara Reeve Clarissa considered contemporary critical journals Critical Review criticism of prose declared Defoe discussed Don Quixote drama eighteenth century ENGLISH CRITICISM entertainment epic Essay expressed fable Fanny Burney favorable Fielding Fielding's genius genre Gothic romance Henry Henry Fielding hero heroic romances History of English humour Ibid imitation incidents interest invention John Johnson Jones Joseph Andrews Laurence Sterne Letters literary literature London Marivaux marvelous Memoirs merits Monthly Review moral narrative nature novelistic criticism Old English Baron period plot poetic Poetry point of view praised preceding preface present Progress of Romance prose fiction prose romance reader realistic portrayal Richardson Robinson Crusoe romantic fiction Sarah Fielding satire sentimental Shaftesbury Smollett Sterne Sterne's story theory Thomas Tom Jones translated Tristram Shandy truth to fact truthful characterization Walpole Wieland William writing wrote
Popular passages
Page 61 - The business of a poet," said Imlac, "is to examine • not the individual but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the tulip or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest.
Page 61 - YE who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow ; attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.
Page 50 - ... we should ever confine ourselves strictly to nature, from the just imitation of which will flow all the pleasure we can this way convey to a sensible reader.
Page 56 - If thou dost delight in these models of perfection, there are books enow written to gratify thy taste; but, as we have not, in the course of our conversation, ever happened to meet with any such person, we have not chosen to introduce any such here.
Page 58 - A novel is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of an uniform plan, and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient. But this plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability, or success, without a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene, by virtue of his own importance.
Page 51 - I would by no means be thought to comprehend those persons of surprising genius, the authors of immense romances, or the modern novel and Atalantis writers '' who, without any assistance from nature or history, record persons who never were, or will be, and facts which never did, nor possibly can, happen; whose heroes are of their own creation, and their brains the chaos whence all their materials are selected.
Page 32 - There is an air of truth apparent through the whole; and indeed, the author was so distinguished for his veracity, that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbours at Redriff, when any one affirmed a thing, to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoke it.
Page 69 - The greater the affliction is in which we see our favourites in these relations engaged, the greater is the pleasure we take in seeing them relieved. Among the many feigned histories which I have met with in my reading, there is none in which the hero's perplexity is greater, and the winding out of it more difficult, than that in a French author whose name I have forgot. It so happens, that the hero's mistress was...
Page 67 - ... touch a romance or novel ; these paint beauty in colours more charming than nature, and describe happiness that man never tastes. How delusive, how destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss ! They teach the youthful mind to sigh after beauty and happiness which never existed ; to despise the little good which fortune has mixed in our cup, by expecting more than she ever gave...
Page 107 - Accordingly it was proposed in the invention of the following work to comprehend as far as the progressive nature of a single story would allow, a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man.