The Rise of the Novel of Manners; A Study of English Prose Fiction Between 1600 and 1740 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Vida de Lazarillo de Tonnes was translated in 1568-9 and reprinted at least twenty times by 1740; La Desordenada Codicia de los Bienes Agenos appeared in 1638, as The Sonne of the Rogue, or Politick Theefe; Guzman de Alfarache, first printed in English in 1622, went through fully a dozen editions in our period. During the years from 1610, the date of Dekker's O per se 0, to 1700, there were only three or four English contributions: The English Rogue by Head and Kirkman, an inferior rifacimento of all the tales of trickery current at its date of publication (1665); Kirk- man's Unlucky Citisen Experimentally Described (1673), which differs from the norm in substituting a poor tradesman for the rogue in service; Teague O'Divelly; or the Irish Rogue (1690), a cheap tract; and The Dutch Rogue, or Guzman of Amsterdam (1683), a wretched copy of the Spanish and possibly a translation. Picaresque material appeared in many of the novels of intrigue, such as Mrs. Behn's Fair Jilt, in the disgusting memoirs of noble rakes,104 as for example, in such translations as Gallant Memoirs, Count Brion, Adventures of a Man of Honour, and finally, in reformative tracts and narratives of a popular nature, of which the best example is Bunyan's Life and Death of Mr. Badman. The form, but not the matter of the picaresque is utilized in a curious little work, The Compleat Mendicant (1699) which recounts the adventures of " an unfortunate gentleman " as a student at Oxford, as a follower of a divine, as a teacher and as a shepherd. The detail, the illusion of actuality, the insistence on the literal truth of the events described, the earnestness and common-sense morality have led the compilers of the British Museum Catalogue, following earlier bibliographers, to attribute it to Defoe, but such authorities as...