The reinvention of the eighteenth-century novel in contemporary British and American fiction

This dissertation examines the "reinvention" of the eighteenth-century novel in contemporary British and American fiction as a discernible and sustained literary movement. The fact that eight of the twelve works considered in this study were published in or after 1980 suggests that this tendency toward reinvention is, by and large, a quite recent literary phenomenon. My use of the term "reinvention" raises a series of important questions: What constitutes "reinvention"? Does it consist primarily of re-writing or re-presenting an earlier work? How can we distinguish between mere literary allusion or ventriloquism and true reinvention? Moreover, why should contemporary novelists wish to reinvent a past literary form at all and, in particular, why should the eighteenth-century novel appear to be such an attractive model? Most importantly, what is the impetus behind such a literary movement? These are the fundamental questions this dissertation proposes to answer.;Chapter five discusses the principal reasons behind this recent interest in reinventing the early English novel. It explores why a significant number of contemporary British and American novelists feel compelled to enter into a complex dialogue with the eighteenth-century novel. In this final chapter I argue that the reinventive impetus guiding these recent authors is expressive of a palpable desire to revitalize the contemporary novel by returning to the roots of the form.;In chapter one I trace the ways in which nine contemporary works variously reinvent the eighteenth-century novel. By looking closely at these nine works, I demonstrate that the impulse toward reinventing the eighteenth-century novel is a strong and varied one in recent British and American fiction. In chapters two, three, and four I examine a trio of recent American novels: John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, Erica Jong's Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, and T. Coraghessan Boyle's Water Music. Despite formal and theoretical differences, these novels share certain fundamental qualities which distinguish them as contemporary fiction's richest examples of reinvention.