Major Works

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Late Enlightenment (Sentimentalism) (1750 - 1780)

The writers of this period, like the Enlighteners of the first two periods, expressed the democratic bourgeois tendencies of their time. They also tried to find a way out of the difficulties of the existing order. However, while their predecessors believed in the force of intellect, they considered feelings (or sentiments) most important. The principal representatives of sentimentalism in the genre of the novel were Oliver Goldsmith (The Vicar of Wakefield) and Lawrence Sterne (Tristram Shandy, The Sentimental Journey) and in drama Richard Sheridan (School for Scandal and other plays).
Also: the delicate pornography of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill,

Tobias Smollet’s Quixotic picaresques

a host of women writers.

Oliver Goldsmith (November 10, 1730 or 1728 - April 4, 1774) was an Irish writer and physician known for his “wonderfully sentimental” novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), his pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770) (written in memory of his brother), and his plays The Good-natur'd Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1771, first performed in 1773). (He is also thought to have written the classic children's tale, The History of Little Goody Two Shoes, giving the world that familiar phrase.)

The originality quotient of literature has never been higher than it was in fiction in this period, especially in the work of Laurence Sterne (1713 - 1768).

A. Sterne was perhaps the most mischievous, eccentric writer of fiction, not merely in the 18 century but in the whole of English literature. He was a North Country parson and was renowned as one of the most stylish and rhetorically brilliant Anglican preachers of his time.

B.The son of an army officer, Sterne was university educated; he spent most of his life as a vicar in Yorkshire. He contracted tuberculosis as a young man and would die at the age of 54. He married and, at the same time, pursued what he called “spiritual adulteries” with ladies outside his marriage by exquisitely written correspondence.

C.Sterne began writing his great novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, to supplement his income as a churchman. Tristram Shandy began to appear in 1759, then continued in serial publication over successive years. The novel was hugely successful, not least for its naughtiness.

D.Sterne’s favorite work of fiction was Don Quixote by Cervantes, and he called his style of writing “Cervantick.” The impossible quest, like the don’s impossible quest, is the basic joke in Tristram Shandy. One can never do the things in life that one sets out to do. Life is always too complex and seems always to defeat the individual.

E.Sterne, in the person of his narrator-hero, Tristram, sets out to tell the whole story of his life. He begins with the comical moment of his own conception, in which his father is interrupted by his mother’s question: “[H]ave you not forgot to wind up the clock?” Squire Shandy curses her for her silly question and, at the same moment, fathers Tristram; our hero’s unlucky life has begun.

F.After this daring introduction, the novel rambles on for nine volumes, published over 10 years. The great joke is that the novel is supposed to be the story of the whole of Tristram’s life, but it’s logistically impossible for Tristram to write it. No matter how many volumes he produces, the novel can never contain everything that happens to him.

G. As Tristram observes, narrative has two axes, one of which he calls the progressive and the other, digressive

1.To write that a man enters and walks across a room is progressive. To note the wallpaper in the room or the color of the man’s tie is digressive.

2.For Tristram, the digressive—what he calls the “sunshine” of the narrative—keeps getting in the way of the progressive. At one point, he calculates that it takes him a year to fully narrate the events of a single day. He will never catch up with himself.

3.This self-reflexive work of literature obviously brings us into postmodernist territory, 150 years before the term “modernism” even came into existence.

Along with Chaucer and Shakespeare, Jane Austen (1775–1817) is one of the three true giants of English literature. We know little about her life, other than the fact that she was born into a clergyman’s family, lived and wrote at home, and died unmarried at age 41. Her novels focus on moral maturity and the paths that will be taken by her heroines. Austen was a theorist about fiction and had an interesting view of the function of the novel: to serve as a source of moral authority and instruction.

In this, she differed from another woman writer of the time, Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), who wrote bestselling gothic fiction. Austen was familiar with and enjoyed Mrs.Radcliffe’s novels but viewed them as corrupting and addicting.

1.

The most well-known author of gothic fiction was Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), who wrote

The Mysteries of Udolpho.

2.

The classic gothic situation is a young girl, scantily dressed, finding herself alone in a mysterious castle or haunted house. We never ask why she is foolish enough to explore the castle’s secret passages because the gothic novel carries us along on its stream of excitement and sensation.

3.

Ann Radcliffe was an important figure in English literature, but she has been totally eclipsed by Austen and Austen’s style of fiction. One of the problems for modern-day readers of Northanger Abbey is that most of them haven’t read The Mysteries of Udolpho, and without that ackground, something of Austen’s narrative is lost.

4.

The gothic novel was a late and bastardized offspring of the Romantic revival that came to England via Germany. Mrs. Radcliffe enjoyed phenomenal, if short-lived, success in this genre in the last years of the 18 century and the first years of the 19

5.

Mrs. Radcliffe’s two most popular gothic novels were The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and

The Italian (1796). The first of these centers on a horrid mystery of something shrouded by a black silk veil. The opening paragraph gives us a sample of Radcliffe’s scene-painting skills.

6.

Mysteriously, Mrs. Radcliffe gave up writing with The Italian, perhaps directed to do so by her

husband.

Ann Radcliffe was born in 1764 in London. She was the only child of a haberdasher which is a fancy word for someone who sells clothing stuff, like zippers and buttons and whatnot. We don't really know that much about her personal life because she was kind of a reclusive person. Actually, even in her own time people didn't know that much about her, so much that she was actually falsely reported to be dead twice (!!). Not to mention rumors that she'd gone totally insane, that she was suffering from incessant terrors brought on by her obsession with Gothic literature.

The 1823 Edinburgh Review had this to say about her: She never appeared in public, nor mingled in private society, but kept herself apart, like the sweet bird that sings its solitary notes, shrouded and unseen. That's kind of a nice description of basically a hermit. She was so secretive that there's no known images or likenesses of her - we don't really know what she looks like, although people say she was attractive. Unlike many writers who we've talked about who achieve posthumous fame - they only get famous after they're dead - she was super famous while she was living. Her books sold well and she was very popular.

She's considered to be, if not the founder, the propagator of Gothic literature. She's known as the Mother of the Gothic or even the Great Enchantress. She wasn’t the first author to write Gothic works; there was a few that came before her, but her style and approach went a long way towards legitimizing the genre as something that wasn't just pop-fluff essentially.

She did write some poetry, but she's really considered a far superior novelist than poet. She churned out six novels during her long and illustrious career. Her first novel is called The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne published in 1789. The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne basically just covers a family feud between two medieval Scottish clans. It's against a backdrop of passion, revenge, extreme landscapes and cool stuff like that. It also covers an extended romance between Mary, who's a girl of noble birth who tends to faint all the time, that's kind of her distinguishing trait, and Alleyn (not Elaine), a handsome commoner who saves her from villains. Luckily, it turns out that Alleyn is actually of noble birth, so then they're able to get married at the end and that ends the strife between those two castles. So that's her first book.

Next she publishes A Sicilian Romance anonymously in the following year. Like its predecessor, it has romance, it has aristocrats, it has these really vivid, striking landscapes; there's castles, there's a villain, there's extended romance that ends in a happy wedding... This novel is notable for being the point where Radcliffe starts developing her mixture of terror and also of poetic descriptions that really help to extend her influence.

She kept up her publishing pace. She released The Romance of the Forest in 1791. This third novel was really her first major success. It's pretty similar to the first two novels, but it's well-known for its use of suspense to really immerse the reader in the story's structure. It follows the heroine Adeline, who is introduced as an orphan but later finds out that she's of noble birth (which probably sounds familiar from that other dude from the castle one that found out that he was of noble birth - Alleyn). The Romance of the Forest also involves the supernatural and a whole bunch of gloomy ruins and terrifying rooms. It also has Radcliffe's typical fairytale ending with lovers being reunited and whatnot.

It's her fourth book that is the most famous, what she's best known for. This is The Mysteries of Udolpho and it's published in 1794, and this really cements her reputation as the Mother of the Gothic. In this one, The heroine is Emily St. Aubert, and she falls in love with a dashing young man named Valancourt, but she fears that she will never see him again after her father's death. She's forced to live with her unsympathetic Aunt who marries Montoni, who is a sinister Italian nobleman.

The last novel published in Radcliffe's lifetime was The Italian in 1797. It's very similar to her past four novels. There's a memorable villain called Schedoni, who is also Italian (she thought Italians were evil, I don't know). Her sixth novel c was published posthumously in 1826 but wasn't that successful. It's notable because unlike in all of the other ones, the supernatural stuff actually isn't explained at the end.

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