Shorter Novels, Eighteenth Century

Shorter Novels, Eighteenth Century - The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia; The Castle of Otranto, a Gothic Story; Vathek, an Arabian Tale

[Skip to Contents] The three novels collected here all belong to the later years of the eighteenth century. The first represents what may be called the last stand of Augustanism before that riot of fancy and imagination, as exemplified by the other two tales, that ushered in the Romantic Revival. Thus in Rasselas we have Johnson, with the fortitude of Atlas, supporting the miseries of the world on his broad shoulders; Horace Walpole shutting us up in his Castle of Otranto, away from reality and all reasonableness; and Beckford, in Vathek, transporting us on his magic carpet to the court of the grandson of Haroun al Raschid, and thence to a region of perdition and eternal fire, where all memory of Augustanism is irretrievably lost. They are strange company these three books, but they are nevertheless infallible indexes to the taste of their time. The fact that Rasselas in 1759 met with such enormous success and that The Castle of Otranto four years later met with perhaps an equal success, indicates as plainly as anything could that although people had not lost their admiration for Johnson, they were already tiring of good sense and quite willing to give free play to those wilder impulses in their natures that Augustanism had sought to discipline. But this time the tide turned with a vengeance! The grave Wordsworth, a romantic himself, is found deploring the frantic novels of this time, although Shelleys young and fiery imagination seized upon them with avidity, and, in Zastrozzi, he wrote an even more frantic one himself. But it was The Castle of Otranto, written in conscious reaction against the domesticities and sentiment of Richardson, with its plea that the material of the novel could be taken from anything but the events of ordinary life, that opened the gates onto the land of Romance. And in its train came all the rest of the Gothic and terror novelistsClara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, Charles Maturinto mention only those who are now chiefly remembered. Vathek, however, stands alone, without predecessors or immediate followers,[viii] belonging to a quite un-English tradition, although the Oriental tale in one shape or another had quite a vogue in the eighteenth centuryif we may include such things as Collinss Persian Eclogues and Goldsmiths Chinaman, or even Rasselas itself, which, at least, has a nominal setting in the East. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 34766
Author: Beckford, William
Release Date: Dec 27, 2010
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Contributor (Author): Johnson, Samuel, 1709-1784, Walpole, Horace, 1717-1797
Editor: Rhys, Ernest, 1859-1946