The novel of circulation, otherwise known as the it-narrative, or object narrative,[1] is a genre of novel common at one time in British literature, and follows the fortunes of an object, for example a coin, that is passed around between different owners. Sometimes, instead, it involves a pet or other domestic animal, as for example in Francis Coventry's The History of Pompey the Little (1751).[2] This and other such works blended satire with the interest for contemporary readers of a roman à clef.[3] They also use objects such as hackney-carriages and bank-notes to interrogate what it meant to live in an increasingly mobile society, and to consider the effect of circulation on human relations.[4]
Examples
1709 Charles Gildon, The Golden Spy has been regarded by modern scholars as "the first, fully-fledged it-narrative in English".[5] But for his contemporaries, it tends to be read as "a Menippean satire, a re-adaptation of Apuleius's The Golden Ass and a sequel to The New Metamorphosis [i.e. Gildon's adaptation of The Golden Ass in 1708]".[6] Later, an episodic structure in which objects "spied" on people became established.[7] Other generic terms used are "object tales" or "spy novels".[8]
1734 Anonymous, The Secret History of an Old Shoe[9]
It has been remarked that the slave narrative genre of the 18th century avoided being confused with the it-narrative, being thought of as a type of biography.[25]
The plot of Middlemarch has been seen to be structured, initially, by a circulation; but to end in a contrasting "subject narrative".[26]
Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle have argued that one popular form of hyperlink cinema, a genre of film characterized by intersecting and multilinear plots, constitutes a contemporary form of it-narrative.[27] In these films, they argue, "the narrative link is the characters' relation to the film's product of choice, whether it be guns, cocaine, oil, or Nile perch."[27]
Notes
^Wolfram Schmidgen (2002). Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property. Cambridge University Press. p. 127. ISBN 978-1-139-43482-9.
^ a b cJohn Mullan (12 October 2006). How Novels Work. Oxford University Press. p. 149. ISBN 978-0-19-162292-2.
^Liz Bellamy (26 September 2005). Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge University Press. p. 121. ISBN 978-0-521-02037-4.
^Ewers, Chris (2018). Mobility in the English Novel from Defoe to Austen. Boydell and Brewer. p. 101-102.
^Jonathan Lamb (2001), 'Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales', Critical Inquiry 28:1 (2001), pp. 133–66, reprinted in Bill Brown (ed.), Things (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 193–226 (p. 213).
^Jingyue Wu (2017), '"Nobilitas sola est atq; unica Virtus": Spying and the Politics of Virtue in The Golden Spy; or, A Political Journal of the British Nights Entertainments (1709)', Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 40:2 (2017), pp. 237–53 doi: 10.1111/1754-0208.12412
^Olivia Murphy (22 February 2013). Jane Austen the Reader: The Artist as Critic. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 79. ISBN 978-1-137-29241-4.
^Mark Blackwell (2007). The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-narratives in Eighteenth-century England. Bucknell University Press. p. 10. ISBN 978-0-8387-5666-9.
^Jolene Zigarovich (2 May 2013). Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Routledge. p. 58. ISBN 978-1-136-18237-2.
^ a b c d e f gMark Blackwell (2007). The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-narratives in Eighteenth-century England. Bucknell University Press. pp. 135–8. ISBN 978-0-8387-5666-9.
^Wolfram Schmidgen (2002). Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property. Cambridge University Press. p. 128. ISBN 978-1-139-43482-9.
^Christina Lupton (29 November 2011). Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain. University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 49–. ISBN 978-0-8122-0521-3.
^ Nicholas Hudson (2005) "Social Rank, 'The Rise of the Novel,' and Whig Histories of Eighteenth-Century Fiction", Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Vol. 17: Iss. 4 (2005), p. 587
^David Scott Kastan (2006). The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. Oxford University Press. p. 114. ISBN 978-0-19-516921-8.
^Liz Bellamy (26 September 2005). Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge University Press. p. 120. ISBN 978-0-521-02037-4.
^Price, Leah (2009). "From The History of a Book to a 'history of the book'". Representations. 108 (1): 120–138. doi:10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.120. S2CID 146277774.
^Mark Blackwell (2007). The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-narratives in Eighteenth-century England. Bucknell University Press. p. 142. ISBN 978-0-8387-5666-9.
^Mark Blackwell (2007). The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-narratives in Eighteenth-century England. Bucknell University Press. p. 144. ISBN 978-0-8387-5666-9.
^Toscano, Alberto; Kinkle, Jeff (2015). Cartographies of the Absolute. Zero. pp. 192, 285.
^E. Annie Proulx (1996). Accordion Crimes. Scribner. ISBN 0-684-83154-6.
^Mark Blackwell (2007). The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-narratives in Eighteenth-century England. Bucknell University Press. p. 280. ISBN 978-0-8387-5666-9.
^Frederick Burwick; Nancy Moore Goslee; Diane Long Hoeveler (30 January 2012). The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature. John Wiley & Sons. p. 237. ISBN 978-1-4051-8810-4.
^Laura Brown (2010). Homeless Dogs & Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Cornell University Press. p. 123. ISBN 978-0-8014-4828-7.
^John Ernest (2014). The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative. Oxford University Press. p. 70. ISBN 978-0-19-973148-0.
^Leah Price (9 April 2012). How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton University Press. p. 108. ISBN 978-1-4008-4218-6.