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1 results

  • Chapter 5 - War and the ‘Elevation’ of the Novel

  • from Part II - Developing Questions
  • Andrew Lincoln, Queen Mary University of London
  • Book:
    Imagining War and Peace in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1690–1820
    Published online:
    10 January 2024
    Print publication:
    23 November 2023, pp 123-156

  • Summary

    This considers the relationship between the elevation of the novel into moral respectability and the turn to anti-heroic discourse. The novels of Daniel Defoe (works influenced by rogue narratives) show little interest in representations of feminine virtue of the kind Richardson foregrounds in his influential Pamela. Where Defoe represents martial violence with relatively few reservations, in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, a concern with feminine virtue is accompanied by anti-heroic discourse which entails critical views of war. As novelists, Fielding and Smollett both represent the malign effects of modern war while, in Amelia, Fielding even represents a form of pacifist feeling. The chapter ends with discussion of the anonymous Ephraim Tristram Bates, in which a potentially excellent soldier is defeated by a corrupt system of military patronage, and of Sternes Tristram Shandy, in which martial virtue has become a matter of moral sentiment, destructive of domestic order.