The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740-1775

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University Press of Kentucky, 2014 M10 17 - 176 páginas

The Conversational Circle offers a model for exploring a range of novels that experiment with narrative patterns. It makes a compelling case that teleological approaches to novel history that privilege the conflict between the individual and society are, quite simply, ahistorical. Twentieth-century historians of the early novel, most prominently Ian Watt, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Terry Castle, have canonized fictions that portray the individual in sustained tension with the social environment. Such fictions privilege a strongly linear structure. Recent reexaminations of the canon, however, have revealed a number of early novels that do not fit this mold.

Betty Schellenberg identifies another kind of plot, one that focuses on the social group—the "conversational circle"—as a model that can affirm traditional values but just as often promotes an alternative sense of community. Schellenberg selects a group of mid-eighteenth-century novels that experiment with this alternative plot structure, embodied by the social circle. Both satirical and sentimental, canonical and non-canonical, these novels demonstrate a concern that individualistic desire threatened to destabilize society. Writing that reflects a circular structure emphasizes conversation and consensus over individualism and conquest. As a discourse that highlights negotiation and harmony, conversation privileges the social group over the individual.

These fictions of the conversation circle include lesser-known works by canonical authors (Henry Fielding's Amelia and Richards's Sir Charles Grandison as well as his sequel to Pamela), long-neglected novels by women (Sarah Fielding's David Simple and its sequel Volume the Last, and Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall), and Tobias Smollet's last novel, Humphrey Clinker. Because they do not fit the linear model, such works have long been dismissed as ideologically flawed and irrelevant.

 

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Contenido

Narrating Sociability in MidEighteenthCentury England
1
1 Consensus the Conversational Circle and MidEighteenthCentury Fiction
8
2 Constructing the Circle in Sarah Fieldings David Simple
22
3 Social Authority and the Domestic Circle in Samuel Richardsons Pamela Part II
36
4 Socializing Desire and Radiating the Exemplary in Samuel Richardsons Sir Charles Grandison
51
5 Silencing the Center in Henry Fieldings Amelia
69
6 Authorizing the Marginalized Circle in Sarah Scotts Millenium Hall
88
7 Mobilizing the Community Immobilizing the Ideal in Tobias Smolletts Humphry Clinke
102
8 Disembodying the Social Circle in Sarah Fieldings Volume the Las
117
A Failed Plot? The Fate of the Conversational Circle in English Fiction
131
Notes
137
Index
161
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Betty Schellenberg is assistant professor of English at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.

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