The most recent link which I simply had to share with my readers was from The Toast (the-toast.net):
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| What were 18th-century folk reading when they weren't reading Defoe, Burney or Richardson? |
The website lists some of the more ludicrous, eyebrow-raising, confusing, and/or tantalizing lesser-known
(mostly unheard of!?) eighteenth-century novels.
Since I'm always on the lookout for new texts to incorporate into my research, this list (and the sources of these titles, included at the bottom of the website) will undoubtedly lead me down many a blind alley--but hopefully also down some happy trails.
Atrocities of a Convent and The Nunnery for Coquettes sound like fun reading....but might also be worthwhile to read in conjunction with Diderot's more well-known convent expose, The Nun.
I will definitely have to check out The Polish Bandit; Or, Who is my bride? just to see if it really is about a Polish bandit. There needs to be more Polish in my research!
The Laughable Adventures of Charles and Lisette; or, The Beards piques my interest in, of course, beards--how could it not? I've posted here about beards not once, but twice!
Similarly, The Adventures of an Irish Smock, Interspersed with Whimsical Anecdotes of a Nankeen Pair of Breeches is must for me, given my interest in breeches and eighteenth-century clothing more generally. So too The Charms of Dandyism; Or, Living in Style. By Olivia Moreland, Chief of the Female Dandies has caught my attention for its intimation of female cross-dressing.
I'll let my lovely readers peruse the list at length, and I invite any and all of you to let me know if you've read any of these works or others like them (i.e. unknown but fascinating). Let me know if they're worth a look, where to find them, and what you thought of them.
Of course, lists like these beg the question: What did eighteenth-century readers read, when they weren't reading what we read from the eighteenth-century canon. Publication histories can be difficult to trace in this time period, as the marketplace was glutted with anonymous pamphlets or pamphlets or novels published under nom de plumes. The Victorian period suffers from the same problem; the amount of novels published in that time period far exceeds today's book publications, which means that there are far more novels to be read than those written by Dickens, the Brontes, Gaskell and other syllabus "stand-bys."
It stands to reason, then, that there might be excellent works of fiction out there, largely unread and waiting to be rediscovered, anthologized and popularized. While I doubt that The Freebooter of the Alps is one of them--who knows? Maybe it is. In any case, it might just be worth checking it out.
A lot of those titles are "It-narratives"--that is, narratives from the perspective of an inanimate objects. Certain objects, like coins, circulate a lot, so their narratives are quite eventful. A film equivalent would be The Yellow Rolls Royce (1964), which follows the vehicle as it changes owners over 20-30 years. It-narratives also have a lot of crossover with slave/servant narratives, because those individuals were denied personhood, and treated as if they simply weren't in the room, and, as a result, they witnessed the private actions of other people in the household. I say give the it-narratives a look!
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