English 609.40 Domesticating Desire: The Political, the Domestic, and the Birth of the Novel
Instructor: Dr. David Oakleaf
The novel emerges at the same time as some now familiar (if troubling) features of modern society:
the fiscal-military state (John Brewer's phrase), necessitated by the high cost of modern warfare, including e.g., a national bank, a funded national debt and a œmonied (as opposed to landed) interest;
a bitter bi-partisan competition for power mediated by a variety of mostly print media in what is now called the public sphere with the concomitant emergence of a class of professional writers;
an increasingly stark and various demarcation between the public and private in a range of cultural endeavours.
Aphra Behn was a sometime government spy in Holland and a playwright for a theatre patronized (and policed) by the state; she adopted amatory fiction to satirize political infidelities, as did Delarivier Manley later. Like Manley, Before they turned to fiction, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift were political propagandists paid (but also threatened) by the government; a nervous government arrested and interrogated Eliza Haywood because of a short novel with Jacobite content and, perhaps, sympathies. Defoe, Swift, and Haywood turned to less obviously political fiction only after the failure of effective political opposition.
Starting with some of Michael McKeon's speculations in The Secret History of Domesticity (2006), we'll explore the ways in which the often amatory "secret history" of political propaganda develops into the often equally amatory domestic fiction we now call the novel. We'll ask a variety of questions: How does individual desire become private and respectable rather than public and scandalous. How is it feminized as it does so? Do this fiction's party-political urgencies persist in this new form? If so, how? Indeed, how political is the domestic, the private?
Texts
We'll begin with the unfamiliar. We'll look at both early novels and related fiction, likely including many of the following (though we probably can't manage all of both Behn's Love-Letters and Manley's New Atalantis). I'll finalize a reading list closer to the event. Feel free to get in touch.
L'Estrange, Roger, trans. Five Love-Letters between a Nun and a Cavalier. [The Portuguese Letters.] 1678 (instructor can provide).
Behn, Aphra. Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister. 1684-87. Penguin.
Manley, Delarivier. The New Atalantis (i.e., Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, of both Sexes). From the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean. 1709. (Penguin)
Arbuthnot, John. From Law is a Bottomless Pit. 1712. The History of John Bull. [available from instructor]
Barker, Mary. Love Intrigues; or, The History of the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia: A Novel. 1713.
Defoe, Daniel. One or two of: Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Moll Flanders 1722. Roxana; or, the Fortunate Mistress. 1724.
Haywood, Eliza. Love in Excess; or, The Fatal Enquiry: A Novel. 1719-20. And Female Spectator No. 5 (instructor can provide)
Swift, Jonathan. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. [Gulliver's Travels.] 1726. [The protopostmodernly inclined should add or perhaps substitute Swift's A Tale of a Tub. 1704; 1710.]
Selected other fiction 1680-1740 and some contextual documents in a course pack.
