Gerd Bayer - Narrative Developments from Chaucer to Defoe

1. Stillness in Motion in the

Seventeenth-Century Theatre

P.A. Skantze

2. The Popular Culture of

Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson

Mary Ellen Lamb

3. Forgetting in Early Modern

English Literature and Culture

Lethes Legacies

Edited by Christopher Ivic and

Grant Williams

4. Luce Irigaray and

Premodern Culture

Thresholds of History

Edited by Theresa Krier and

Elizabeth D. Harvey

5. Writing, Geometry and Space

in Seventeenth-Century England

and America

Circles in the Sand

Jess Edwards

6. Dramatists and their Manuscripts

in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson,

Middleton and Heywood

Authorship, Authority and

the Playhouse

Grace Ioppolo

7. Reading the Early Modern Dream

Edited by Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle

O Callaghan, and S. J. Wiseman

8. Fictions of Old Age in Early

Modern Literature and Culture

Nina Tauton

9. Performing Race and Torture on

the Early Modern Stage

Ayanna Thompson

10. Women, Murder, and Equity in

Early Modern England

Randall Martin

11. Narrative Developments from

Chaucer to Defoe

Edited by Gerd Bayer and Ebbe Klitgrd

First published 2011

by Routledge

270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2011 Taylor & Francis

The right of Gerd Bayer and Ebbe Klitgrd to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Narrative developments from Chaucer to Defoe / edited by Gerd Bayer and Ebbe Klitgrd.

p. cm. (Routledge studies in Renaissance literature and culture ; 11)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. English fictionHistory and criticism. 2. FictionTechniqueHistory. 3. Narration (Rhetoric)History. 4. Literary formHistory. I. Bayer, Gerd, 1971 II. Klitgrd, Ebbe.

PR826.N37 2011

823'.00923dc22

2010036344

ISBN13: 978-0-415-87948-4 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-83028-4 (ebk)

EBBE KLITGRD AND GERD BAYER

EBBE KLITGRD

MONIKA FLUDERNIK

MIRIAM NANDI

WILLIAM A. QUINN

ANNA SWRDH

6 Telling Tales: The Artistry of Lady Mary Wroths Urania

RAHEL ORGIS

ROBERT W. MASLEN

G. GABRIELLE STARR

GORAN STANIVUKOVIC

GERD BAYER

NEIL CARTLIDGE

CHRISTINA WALD

This book first began during a teaching exchange that brought the editors together and made us realize that there is a gap in historical narrative research between the late medieval and the early modern period of English literature. Setting out to sketch that territory, we next both organized a seminar at the 2008 conference of the European Society for the Study of English, held at Aarhus University, Denmark. From this, and from a seminar at the 2009 meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association at Harvard University, we pulled a number of papers that, mostly heavily revised, provided a starting point for the book. Further chapters were solicited where we felt that additional coverage of historical or topical content might benefit the overall scheme. We gladly acknowledge that the project received early and encouraging support from Erica Wetter, Elizabeth Levine, and Polly Dodson at Routledge. Two external reviewers provided helpful suggestions that helped us work on the final versions of various chapters. A special thanks is due to our contributors, who stunningly stuck to all our deadlines, patiently listened to our suggestions and requests, and throughout were a real pleasure to work with!

The history of early modern prose fiction relies on the development of formal narrative properties across distinct aesthetic traditions. This collection brings together a range of contributions from literary critics working in medieval studies, renaissance studies, and the Restoration period. It thus sets out to shed new light on a process of formal and informal negotiations between authors and readers about the shape, tone, and direction of narrative forms from, roughly, 1400 to 1700. Much recent work has studied aspects of this process. Naomi Conn Lieblers Early Modern Prose Fiction (2007) as well as Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Waynes Staging Early Modern Romance (2009) have added significantly to the state of discussion. Lieblers volume concentrates on social issues relating to class and gender during the Renaissance, with some of the contributions also taking the formal analysis of prose genres in new directions. Lamb and Wayne have collected an impressive range of essays that probe the relationship between romance traditions in prose and drama, taking Shakespeares romances and their prose hypotexts as case-in-point for the claim that thematic echoes reverberated widely across generic divisions. Both books show very convincingly that early modern literature needs to be studied without the blinkers that notions of generic purity may impose on an analysis of the larger system of literature and book culture. Concentrating on the romance as a thematic mode, thus following Barbara Fuchss argument in her monograph Romance (2004), the contributions to Staging Early Modern Romance show the way for what, in the light of academic traditions within the field of English, one could term inner-disciplinary interdisciplinarity. The present volume hopes to reach a similarly inclusive methodological range. It follows, however, a different heuristic trajectory in its perusal of formal developments across a wider historical range while limiting itself more narrowly to narrative fiction.

The historical bracket around the essays collected here, in fact, relates to the history of narrative fiction as it played out in the early modern age. In other words, the use of Chaucer and Defoe as metonymic framing devices suggests that the literary developments represented by these two authors constitute, in case of the former, the highpoint of medieval narrative form and, in the latter, the beginning of Enlightenment prose fiction. The period in between, studied in parts by scholars like Margaret Schlauch, appears as a transitory move, rich in experimentation and thus filled with cross-generic influences. How particular genres affected, influenced, or repelled early modern prose as a narrative tradition marks one of the central themes throughout the chapters included in this volume. In this, they follow an observation that Fredric Jameson, while discussing the romance, uses to link the formal changes in a particular genre to their level of connectivity to the social environment: To put it another way, the combinatoire aims at revealing, not the causes behind a given form, but rather the conditions of possibility of its existence (158). The chapters in the present volume investigate some of these conditions.