routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

166 Restoration to Romanticism 1660–1789
THE NOVEL
There was nothing talked of but this young and gallant
slave
(Aphra Behn, Oroonoko)
The concern of the Augustan age was not so much with exploration –
both of the bounds of human potential and of the bounds of geography
and the sciences, which were the concerns of the Renaissance – as
with experience. The novel and fiction became the dominant form
and genre in terms of readership, although for more than a century
they would be considered ‘inferior’ by critics.
The novel was not a sudden innovation at the end of the seventeenth
century. Accounts of travels, which may or may not have been fictionalised
to some extent, go back as far as the Travels of Sir John Mandeville,
probably published in 1375. Other worlds and cultures, ways of living
and believing, became a main characteristic of fiction through the
Elizabethan age. Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) provides
us with one of the earliest picaresque tales in English. It recounts ‘the life
of Jack Wilton’ in a mixture of styles, anticipating the picaresque heroes
and heroines of Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding just over a century
later. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia was also influential in ‘fictionalising travel’
and thus providing impetus to the growth of the novel (see page 82).
In general, however, the exotic influence in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century literature was to be tamed; subsumed into
recognisably English middle-class ways of thinking and brought into
line with the worldview of the time. Englishness could always dominate
over exoticism: English readers could usually feel they were superior
to any of the outlandish behaviour or ways of life they read about. So,
although the fascination with the exotic, seen in travellers’ tales over
the centuries from Mandeville to Raleigh, is a common theme, the
concern now was not simply to document but to accommodate
experience within recognisable bounds.
The expanding readership was largely female and upper or uppermiddle
class. The new ethos indicated that all kinds of social behaviour
be monitored, regulated, controlled. So, in many novels, a new morality
is propounded, covering male/female relationships, figures of authority,