routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

The novel
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Each serial volume of the novel was accompanied by a key explaining
who the characters were. The novel exposed the corruption of the
worlds of high society and politics, and continued a trend of scandalmongering
which has been a mainstay of popular publishing ever since.
Clearly, lines of demarcation were being drawn, and scandalous
novels were deemed unacceptable, while satiric verse, for a much
more limited readership, could be condoned. But satire, explicitness
in sexual terms, religious questioning and threats to the government’s
status quo were consistently muzzled, and driven out of what was
considered ‘proper’ in literature. Propriety became a key concept in
literature, and was directly related to the critical concerns of the
Augustan, or neo-classical age.
It will be hard for a private history to be taken
for genuine
(Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year)
The novels of Daniel Defoe are fundamental to eighteenth-century ways of
thinking. They range from the quasi-factual A Journal of the Plague Year,
an almost journalistic (but fictional) account of London between 1664 and
1665 (when the author was a very young child), to Robinson Crusoe, one
of the most enduring fables of Western culture. If the philosophy of the
time asserted that life was, in Hobbes’s words, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,
and short’, novels showed ways of coping with ‘brutish’ reality (the plague;
solitude on a desert island) and making the best of it. There was no
questioning of authority as there had been throughout the Renaissance.
Instead, there was an interest in establishing and accepting authority, and
in the ways of ‘society’ as a newly ordered whole.
Thus, Defoe’s best-known heroine, Moll Flanders, can titillate her
readers with her first-person narration of a dissolute life as thief,
prostitute, and incestuous wife, all the time telling her story from the
vantage point of one who has been accepted back into society and
improved her behaviour.
. . . every branch of my story, if duly considered, may be useful
to honest people, and afford a due caution to people of some