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What is the significance of the historical novel and/ or representations of history in the post-war British novel?
Literature Essay

• Assessment: essay
• Mark: A
• Year: 2006
• Wordcount: 3083

Excerpt:
After the Second World War, Britain saw extensive social and political changes. The gradual loss of Britain’s colonies, the growth of the Welfare State, followed by its erosion from the 70s onwards and the anxieties linked to the Cold War, were just some of the developments that resulted in a change and redefinition of Britain’s intellectuals’ attitudes towards history (Connor 2002: 3). Conner (2002: 3) argues that “Britain seemed progressively to lose possession of its own history” because it has lost its belief “that it was the subject of its own history”. This new understanding of history is reflected in the literature of this time. Many post-war writers perceived history as a “matter of gaps, absences and enigmas” (Connor 2002: 134) rather than a progressive ‘grand narrative’.
Since the bases for “historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts” (De Man 2004: 493), many post war writers assumed that “both history and fiction derive from and produce texts” (Scanlan 2005: 155). Thus several post war novelists regarded their art as a way in which “history is made, and remade” (Connor 2002: 1). In this essay I will look at two post war novels that are both a response to English history and also a critical investigation of the “possibility under which history may be narratable at all” (Connor 2002: 133). In discussing John Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, this essay will examine what impact the change in the perceptions of history had on post war novelists and how this affected their writing. In addition, I will outline the ways in which these texts expose the process of history making and therefore exemplify the post war authors’ complex historical understandings (Deistler 1999: 97).
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is set in the Edinburgh of the 1930s and as such “directly related to the history of fascism and the aftermath of war” (Cheyette 2005: 369). ...

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Literature

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

“How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?” (Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verse, p. 8)

well its worth it, don’t you think?

I am on page 208… still a few hundred pages to go… and I don’t mind… hopefully it never ends.

Literature General

Does the eighteenth century witness the emergence of ‘realism’ in the English novel?
Literature Essay

• Assessment: Essay
• Mark: A
• Year: 2006
• Wordcount: 1629

Excerpt:
George Levine (1981: 240) defines realism in the English novels “as a self-conscious effort, usually in the name of some moral enterprise of truth telling and extending the limits of human sympathy, to make literature appear to be describing directly […] reality itself”. In Roland Barthes (1986: 260) view “realism is only fragmentary, erratic, confined to ‘details’” and one has to bear in mind that even “the most realistic narrative imaginable develops along unrealistic lines”. Ian Watt defines realism in different ways. One definition is that realism portrays “all the varieties of human experience” (Watt 2000: 11) and identifies “a belief in the individual apprehension of reality through the senses” (Watt 2000: 14).
Hence, each approach focuses on a specific characteristic of the genre and identifies its link with realism. The text’s characters within their environment, the used language, a realistic plot and the author’s claim of truth, all attempt to reflect a “correspondence between life and literature” (Watt 2000: 12). In analysing Moll Flanders and Lemuel Gulliver within their “play between illusion and reality” (Davis 1983: 11) the emergence of realism in the 18th century is, on the one hand, examined and, on the other hand, questioned in this essay.

Swift frames Lemuel Gulliver as a simple and honest seaman, who is “neither a fool nor a genius; resourceful, energetic and brave, though not on the grand heroic scale;” (Ward 1973: 121-122). Yet, according to Ward (1973:125) Gulliver cannot be identified as a fully developed human personality because he is “representing some aspects of humanity, or ourselves, never the whole”. Despite of some biographical records the reader does not obtain “any sort of expression of Gulliverian personality in anything Gulliver says” (Rawson 2005: 23). Swift uses Gulliver as the observing and framing tool through which the satire develops. He equips Gulliver with curiosity and an obsession for travelling but he does not unfold Gulliver’s personal story and feelings or present an understandable mental development within his character (Rawson 2005: 22-23). As long as the reader is willing to identify with some aspects of Gulliver he has fulfilled his purpose.
Like Gulliver also Moll Flanders lacks attitude…

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Category: Literature
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Literature Literary-Analysis