Novel instruction: Reading, pedagogy, and the ideal of innocence in eighteenth-century British fiction.

摘要

"Novel Instruction" reconsiders the role of pedagogy in the eighteenth-century novel by examining a preoccupation that is central to eighteenth-century conduct books, literary criticism and novels themselves: the value and fragility of feminine innocence. In the eighteenth century, the word innocence literally translates as sexual purity; it also connotes other positive feminine traits, such as artlessness, simplicity, or, in extreme cases, ignorance. Critics take it for granted that innocence and virtue go hand in hand in the novels of the period, and that these qualities define the ideal heroine. But in the novels I examine, by Eliza Haywood, John Cleland, Samuel Richardson, and Oliver Goldsmith, innocence is not constructed as an uncomplicated ideal. Rather, it is represented as simultaneously a virtue and a trap---innocence in the sense of chastity is repeatedly figured as vulnerable to seduction or rape, while innocence in the sense of guilelessness or ignorance of the world leaves characters open to fraud and deception.;In emphasizing the vulnerability of innocence, these authors engage in a radical pedagogic project. While conduct books tend to represent innocence as a positive virtue, the novels I examine here suggest that the idealization of innocence is at best problematic, and at worst destructive. They suggest that a greater knowingness is a necessary virtue, and as such begin to model a mode of critical reading that applies both in life and in texts. In depicting innocence as an unstable virtue, these texts implicitly and explicitly aim to create educated, experienced, judicious readers. This thesis sheds light on significant connections between texts whose common pedagogical aims have not been explored by critics: those that positioned themselves as explicitly moral, with overtly didactic intentions (such as Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison and Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield) and those that were regarded as scandalous and morally transgressive (such as Haywood's Love in Excess and Cleland's Fanny Hill ), and yet were deeply and deliberately instructive.