18th Century Novels - Search & Destory

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SIRS! I feel that we must investigate the works of the western novel's first century. What works from this era repay close investigation, and what should be forever shunned?

I must confess to having never actually read any 18th century novel, but I feel that I would do well to wade through "Tristram Shandy", "Shamela", "Melmoth The Wanderer", "The Monk", "The Castle Of Otranto" and many others. Conversely, I recommend that all wise readers shun "Pamela".

But what, sirs, is your opinion?

― DV (dirtyvicar), Tuesday, 4 January 2005 16:57 (twenty years ago)

Search: Tristam Shandy. The great weakness of it is Sterne's fondness for slipping into bathetic sentimentality - but he usually recovers in time to cock a snook at himself for being such a sentimental prat. Parts of it are high genius of the rarest sort and well worth wading through the blander intervals to get at.

Destroy: Pamela fer sure. The eighteenth century may have been agog for epic-length epistolary soap-operatic drivel, but that doesn't make it good. Reading it is like an eternity spent in hell.

― Aimless (Aimless), Tuesday, 4 January 2005 17:12 (twenty years ago)

If you're going to read Shamela, then you have to read Pamela first. Sorry, but that's just the way it is. You'll appreciate the reasoning once you've started Shamela.

Other keepers: Tom Jones, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Moll Flanders... especially Moll Flanders.

The wit of the age is really in the drama, rather than the emerging novel.

― SRH (Skrik), Tuesday, 4 January 2005 17:45 (twenty years ago)

Search: Tom Jones, Candide, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Non-fiction: the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Destroy: Clarissa. Lovelace is one of my favorite characters in all literature, but he's trapped under mountains of the most repetitive, tedious prose imaginable. And Clarissa is irritating as hell--kind of like an 18th-century Diane Chambers.

― Gail S, Tuesday, 4 January 2005 19:09 (twenty years ago)

Also, if you can get hold of any Eliza Haywood, then do. My learnéd books on writers call her a hack. They don't know nuffink, though.

― SRH (Skrik), Tuesday, 4 January 2005 19:17 (twenty years ago)

Another vote for Tristram Shandy. Also, although I suppose it's more of a travel book than a novel, you can't go wrong with Xavier de Maistre's "Voyage Around My Room".

― Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 4 January 2005 20:13 (twenty years ago)

I still haven't gotten round to reading more than eight pages of Tristam S. Do you guys recommend 'The Florida Edition'?

― Ken L (Ken L), Tuesday, 4 January 2005 20:30 (twenty years ago)

Does it come with suntan lotion and a mojito? Because in that case, maybe.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 5 January 2005 06:58 (twenty years ago)

Haha. I dunno. A friend was telling me a few years back that U of Florida had done some major computerized reannotation with lots of new user friendly footnotes and so I had to get "the Florida edition", but as I maybe posted somewhere else where the post may or may not still be, sometimes that extra stuff is actually off-putting.

― Ken L (Ken L), Wednesday, 5 January 2005 07:10 (twenty years ago)

I have to say, when I read the Penguin edition I really enjoyed the endnotes. But I'm into endnotes.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 5 January 2005 08:07 (twenty years ago)

i mostly slept through my 18th century novel class because it was at the ungodly hour of 10am, but i remember liking tom jones and the monk. i skimmed tristram shandy and somehow managed to bluff my way through a final exam essay question on it, but the intense theory boys in the class LOVED it and wrote strangely detailed papers on things like the significance of the black page. pamela was pure torture, rendered vaguely interesting when taken with shamela (srh is right; there's hardly any point to reading the latter on its own).

― lauren (laurenp), Wednesday, 5 January 2005 10:36 (twenty years ago)

But surely if you have absorbed the essential points of Pamela through discourse then Shamela can be enjoyed?

― DV (dirtyvicar), Wednesday, 5 January 2005 14:00 (twenty years ago)

You have a point, although it reminds me a little bit of my old roommate who would go to Freshman English class and would enter the discussion by saying "I haven't done the reading yet, but what I THINK you're saying is..."

― Ken L (Ken L), Wednesday, 5 January 2005 14:06 (twenty years ago)

I used to be up bright and excited and raring to go for 3-hour classes at 9am.

I did not manage to finish Tristram Shandy, or come anywhere near. I have never attempted any of the others neither.

The Vicar must surely read Melmoth The Wanderer - but hang on: isn't that a C19 novel?

― the finefox, Thursday, 6 January 2005 11:42 (twenty years ago)

Search: 'Destory'

― the finefox, Thursday, 6 January 2005 11:43 (twenty years ago)

I used to be up bright and excited and raring to go for 3-hour classes at 9am

you've not read pamela. when you do, i'd be interested to know how excited you'd be to get out of bed on a below-zero ohio winter morning and discuss it.

― lauren (laurenp), Thursday, 6 January 2005 12:25 (twenty years ago)

My strongest recollection of reading Pamela is shouting "I KNOW ALREADY!" at the 1600th mention of her precious fucking virtue, and hurling the book across the room.

This got me some strange looks in the reading room. I know I really should read Clarissa, but really, I daren't.

― SRH (Skrik), Thursday, 6 January 2005 16:30 (twenty years ago)

Let me go all ILM on you for a minute and retitle the thread as
"(Here Comes Your) 18th Century Novel Breakdown."

― Ken L (Ken L), Thursday, 6 January 2005 16:54 (twenty years ago)

Search: 'Destory'

oh no, I shamed by I English am.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Thursday, 6 January 2005 23:40 (twenty years ago)

The Vicar must surely read Melmoth The Wanderer - but hang on: isn't that a C19 novel?

it's the kind of book I talk about, but I've never read it.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Thursday, 6 January 2005 23:43 (twenty years ago)

I will check, Vicar.

Norwich can be cold, also. Early on long gone November mornings I would cycle across town beneath the dark blue skies, past the lighted moving and halting buses and the old housing stock of the provincial suburbs, and still be looking forward to the imminent intellectual engagement. It is true, though, that we never studied Samuel Richardson.

― the bellefox, Monday, 10 January 2005 14:29 (twenty years ago)

Seamus Deane's buik tells me that Charles Maturin published Melmoth the Wandered in ... 1820.

― the finefox, Monday, 10 January 2005 16:27 (twenty years ago)

'Wandered'!

Destory!!

― the finefox, Monday, 10 January 2005 16:40 (twenty years ago)

Melmoth is still sitting on my shelf, uncracked... I have to get my nose out of the Balzac NOW, I still haven't finished the Gormenghast books, what will the other goth kids say?!?!?

― Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Tuesday, 11 January 2005 02:04 (twenty years ago)

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