The World Is Not Enough: Lists as Encounters with the “Real” in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Birke, Dorothee

doi:10.5325/style.50.3.0296

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Research Article| August 01 2016

The World Is Not Enough: Lists as Encounters with the “Real” in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Dorothee Birke

Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies

dorothee birke is a research fellow at the Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies (AIAS). Her main interests are the relations between the contemporary and the eighteenth-century English novel, reception aesthetics, the medial history of reading, and contemporary drama. Among her publications are a book on representations of memory crises in the contemporary British novel (2008) and articles in Narrative, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Journal of Popular Culture. Her study Writing the Reader: Configuration of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel is due to come out from de Gruyter in summer 2016.

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Style (2016) 50 (3): 296–308.

https://doi.org/10.5325/style.50.3.0296

ABSTRACT

The list plays a key role in the development of the eighteenth-century novel as a self-consciously innovative form. In this essay I examine the function of enumerations in two key texts, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, where they not only produce a heightened sense of credibility and plausibility, but also import contemporary systems of thought and stage interiority and negotiate the status of the novel in relation to other types of text. The form of the list, I argue, is to be seen as an instrument in a larger project of novelistic self-assertion.

novel, eighteenth century, realism, lists, Robinson Crusoe, Oroonoko

2016

The Pennsylvania State University

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The World Is Not Enough: Lists as Encounters with the “Real” in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

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