Nicholas Seager

The afterlives of eighteenth-century fiction

Introduction 1. On authorship, appropriation, and eighteenth-century fiction Daniel Cook 2. The afterlife of family romance Michael McKeon 3. From Picaro to Pirate: afterlives of the Picaresque in early eighteenth-century fiction Leah Orr 4. Ghosts of the guardian in Sir Charles Grandison and Bleak House Sarah Raff 5. The novels afterlife in the newspaper, 1712-1750 Nicholas Seager 6. Wit and humour for the heart of sensibility: the beauties of Fielding and Sterne M.-C. Newbould 7. The spectral iamb: the poetic afterlife of the late eighteenth-century novel Dahlia Porter 8. Rethinking fictionality in the eighteenth-century puppet theatre David A. Brewer 9. The novel in musical theatre: Pamela, Caleb Williams, Frankenstein and Ivanhoe Michael Burden 10. Gillrays Gulliver and the 1803 invasion scare David Francis Taylor 11. Defoes cultural afterlife, mainly on screen Robert Mayer 12. Happiness in Austens Sense and Sensibility and its afterlife in film Jill Heydt-Stevenson 13. Refashioning The History of England: Jane Austen and 1066 and All That Peter Sabor Select bibliography.

A Romance the likest to Truth that I ever read: History, Fiction, and Politics in Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier

the relationship of Daniel Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720) to the emergence of the English novel remains unexplained and therefore underplayed. Some critics laud it as a historical novel almost a century before Walter Scott established the genre’s “classical form,” according to Lukacs.1 Others deem it a “mere chronicle,” a “deadening historical narrative,” an extreme example of Defoe’s reportorial and ventriloquial skills, but displaying little of the novelistic, that which draws attention to complex narrative situations and structures.2 And Robert Mayer cites Memoirs of a Cavalier as a case in point for his thesis that Defoe’s narratives were originally presented and read as a mode of historical discourse and only subsequently read into the tradition of the novel: “But for the fact that it was written after Crusoe rather than before, it might never have been read as

John Bunyan and Socinianism

This article recovers John Bunyans engagement with Socinianism in his doctrinal and imaginative writings. After surveying the rise of Socinianism in seventeenth-century England, the article augments the known theological contexts of Bunyans disputes with the Quakers and the Latitudinarians by showing that he charges these groups with slighting the Son and so associates them with anti-Trinitarian heresy. Bunyans recourse when affirming the Trinity is to biblical typology, a hermeneutical method and manner of structuring narratives which Bunyan uses to uphold the embattled orthodox views of Christs divinity, the propitiatory atonement and justification by faith.

Literary Evaluation and Authorship Attribution, or Defoe's Politics at the Hanoverian Succession

In this essay, Nicholas Seager argues for re-attributing two pamphlets to Daniel Defoe: A Secret History of One Year (1714) and Memoirs of the Conduct of Her Late Majesty and Her Last Ministry (1715). These works, published shortly after the Hanoverian succession, were excluded from Defoe’s canon by Furbank and Owens on the grounds that the writing was poor in quality. A closer review of the external and internal evidence, however, points to Defoe as the author of these occasional political tracts, which reveal his attempts to attenuate what he perceived as the harmful effects of government by a single-party ministry.

Defoe at 350

Fortunately, there is much of interest in the two hitherto unpublished essays. “Power and happiness: empirical social enquiry in Britain, from ‘Political arithmetic’ to ‘moral statistics’” is an important reexamination of the argument that there was a lapse of interest in systematically amassing and analyzing information between the political arithmetic of the late seventeenth century and the statistics of a century later. instead, innes argues that whereas there was a dip in interest from the 1720s to the 1740s, from the 1760s there was a revival of interest in the project of assessing national power and wealth. as innes shows, print became an increasingly vital medium in constructing and supporting the functioning of an inquiring community, and she also draws appropriate attention to the role of Parliament, which is the subject of two other chapters.