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The Oriental Captivity Narrative and Early English Fiction

The Oriental Captivity Narrative and Early English Fiction

Joe Snader, University of Maryland

Volume 9, no. 3, April 1997

©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.

ABSTRACT

While colonial and postcolonial issues have generated much recent literary scholarship on the nineteenth and twentieth-century novel, the relationship between empire and the earlier development of the English novel has not received the attention it deserves. This is particularly surprising when we consider the enormous expansion of British power during the eighteenth century and the period’s wealth of novels commenting or focusing on alien lands. Nevertheless, recent studies of the generic predecessors of the English novel, even as they revise, extend, and complicate Ian Watt’s seminal formulation of the novel’s origins, still tend to downplay empire in their emphasis on English domesticity, English class formation, empirical epistemology, and an implicitly English psychological interiority. Although students of eighteenth-century literature have begun to explore issues of empire in increasing depth, they have generally explored the relationship between the novel and British colonial expansion by reading individual texts, especially Oroonoko and Robinson Crusoe. The candidacy of these texts for the position of “first novel” has contributed to broadly theorized but insufficiently illustrated claims about British imperialism and the origins of the English novel, particularly in terms of a connection between the discursive strategies of empire and the novel’s reliance on a voice of realistic, factual, or empirical authority. If we shift our attention, however, from individual texts to generic patterns, we can find much more concrete and extensive connections between the early novel and colonialist strategies of discursive domination.

Other ECF articles on the topic of “Colonialism” include:

Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)
by JOHN C. LEFFEL (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)

Penelope Aubin and Narratives of Empire
by EDWARD J. KOZACZKA (ECF 25.1, Fall 2012)

Cosmopolitans, Slaves, and the Global Market in Voltaire’s Candide, ou l’optimisme
by INGVILD HAGEN KJØRHOLT (ECF 25.1, Fall 2012)

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Read ECF journal vols. 1-27 on Project MUSE.