Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-tnzcf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-14T00:49:55.110Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Carnivalization of Eighteenth-Century English Narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

Terry Castle
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Following the institutionalization of the public masquerade in England in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the masquerade set piece becomes a standard, though problematic, topos in English fiction, figuring prominently in novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Burney, Inchbald, and others. Though characteristically considered an allegory for the corrupt “Town,” the masquerade “diversion” also serves crucial narrative and thematic functions. As a place of unexpected meetings and surprising assignations, it precipitates imbroglio and intrigue, the elaboration of plot itself; and its transgressive social and sexual reversals and exchanges intimate the collapse of ideological and didactic lucidity. Leaving in its wake a world upside down, it coincides with an incursion of mutability and ambiguity into the static world of eighteenth-century representation. Just as the real masquerade represented a carnivalesque disruption of the eighteenth-century symbolic order, the masquerade episode disturbs the prevailing decorum of eighteenthcentury English fiction.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 99 , Issue 5 , October 1984, pp. 903 - 916
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Works Cited

Addison, Joseph. The Tatler and Guardian. Edinburgh, 1880.Google Scholar
Addison, Joseph. The Works of Joseph Addison. Ed. Richard Hurd. 6 vols. London, 1811.Google Scholar
Addison, Joseph, and Steele, Richard. The Spectator. Ed. Bond, Donald F.. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965.Google Scholar
Babcock, Barbara. “The Novel and the Carnival World.” Modern Language Notes 89 (1974): 911–37.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, M. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Iswolsky, Helene. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968.Google Scholar
Blewett, David. Defoe's Art of Fiction. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. New York: Harper, 1978.Google Scholar
Burney, Fanny. Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress. 5 vols. London, 1784.Google Scholar
Castle, Terry. “Eros and Liberty at the English Masquerade 1710-1790.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1983-84): 156–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crane, R. S. “The Plot of Tom Jones.” Journal of General Education 4 (1950): 112–30.Google Scholar
Defoe, Daniel. Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress. Ed. Jack, Jane. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964.Google Scholar
Ek, Grete. “Glory, Jest, and Riddle: The Masque of Tom Jones in London.” English Studies 60 (1979): 148–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fielding, Henry. Amelia. Ed. Henley, William Ernest. 2 vols. New York: Cass, 1967.Google Scholar
Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones. Ed. Baker, Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1973.Google Scholar
Folkenflik, Robert. “Tom Jones, the Gypsies, and the Masquerade.” University of Toronto Quarterly 44 (1975): 224–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griffin, Benjamin. The Masquerade; or, An Evening's Intrigue. London, 1717.Google Scholar
Halsband, Robert. The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956.Google Scholar
Horace Walpole's Correspondence. Ed. Lewis, W. S. et al. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960.Google Scholar
Hunter, J. Paul. Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Inchbald, Elizabeth. A Simple Story. Ed. Tompkins, J. M. S.. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967.Google Scholar
Mann, Horace. Letter to Horace Walpole, 30 July 1741. In Horace Walpole's Correspondence.Google Scholar
Plumb, J. H. The Commercialisation of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England. Reading, Eng.: Univ. of Reading Press, 1973.Google Scholar
Ribeiro, Aileen. “The Dress Worn at Masquerades in England, 1730 to 1790, and Its Relation to Fancy Dress in Portraiture.” Diss. Univ. of London, Courtauld Inst., 1975.Google Scholar
Ribeiro, Aileen. “The Elegant Art of Fancy Dress.” In An Elegant Art: Fashion and Fantasy in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Maeder, Edward. New York: Abrams and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1983.Google Scholar
Richardson, Samuel. Pamela. 2 vols. London: Dent, 1914.Google Scholar
Richardson, Samuel. Sir Charles Grandison. Ed. Harris, Jocelyn. 2 vols. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972.Google Scholar
Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Howard, Richard. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975.Google Scholar