Nation and Novel

For fairly obvious reasons (for some years now I have been engaged with my own variation on the theme) I love reading histories of literature, and Nation and Novel by Patrick Parrinder is a particularly interesting example because of its thematic content. What he attempts to do is show how the English novel (and though the last chapter is largely devoted to immigrant literature, the book is explicitly limited to English literature, no Irish or Welsh authors are included, and despite the presence of Walter Scott little comes from Scotland either) both engages with and illuminates the ever-changing question of the English national character. In fact he pretty clearly lays at the door of literature the notion that there might be such a thing as a ‘national character’. Thematically this tends to come down to a binary opposition: Puritan versus Cavalier, which he also tends to recast in political terms as Whig versus Tory (even when socialism comes into the political picture and becomes the main opposition to toryism, Parrinder tends to continue using these two terms). Curiously, he seems to equate Puritan and Tory, an equation I’m not entirely comfortable with. And in the final analysis, certainly in so far as we accept his view of significant works and trends, it would appear that in literary terms the Puritan and the Tory come out ahead. I tend to think he overplays this opposition, especially as we get into the 20th century. I was quite relieved when Puritan/Cavalier seemed to disappear from the story around the 1920s and 30s, until he suddenly reintroduced the opposition in his discussion of Kingsley Amis. But then, when the TLS did their books of the year a couple of weeks back, A.N. Wilson introduced his selection by saying he had picked one Puritan and one Cavalier; so maybe the terms continue to have a relevance.

Statistics

In Nation and Novel, Patrick Parrinder tells us that 450 new works of prose fiction were published during the 17th century, of which 213 were translations. In other words there were 237 new works of prose fiction written and published in England during the century. Of those 237 works, I know of the following utopian or science fictions:

The Picture of a Perfit Commonwealth by Thomas Floyd (1600)
Mundus Alter et Idem by Joseph Hall (1605)
New Atlantis by Francis Bacon (1627)
The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin (1638)
A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria by Gabriel Plattes (1641)
Nova Solyma by Samuel Gott (1648)
A New and More Exact Mappe by Mary Cary (1651)
The Commonwealth of Oceana by James Harrington (1656)
Letters from Utopia by Marchemont Nedham (1657)
Government Described by John Streeter (1659)
New Atlantis Continued by R.H. (1660)
The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish (1666)
The Isle of Pines by Henry Neville (1668)
The History of the Sevarites by Denis Vairasse (1675)
Gerania by Joshua Barnes (1675)
Antiquity Reviv’d by Francis Lee (1693)
The Free State of Noland by Anon (1696)

And probably quite a few other that I have missed. Some of these (Floyd, Plattes, Streeter, are little more than political tracts in disguise) and the Cary is an expression of the beliefs of one of the extreme puritan sects that flourished at the time. Yet the Bacon was one of the most influential books of the century, directly contributing to the foundation of the Royal Society. The Godwin was hugely popular, was continuously in print for several centuries, directly inspired fiction by Cyrano de Bergerac and a play by Aphra Behn, and was one of the major influences on the work of Jules Verne. Cavendish was a phenomenon, one of the first women along with Behn to earn a living as a writer. Harrington was a friend of Cromwell and influenced the political thinking of the time. Neville was one of the most popular writers of the period, famous for rather risque work. So this is a far from insignificant list.

In other words, nearly 10% of all the prose fictions published during the century (and probably more, I’m sure there are a number of works from the last quarter of the century that I have so far missed) were utopian or science fictions. It is a huge and significant proportion. Yet curiously not a single one of these works or authors (not even Bacon, Godwin or Cavendish) is even mentioned by Parrinder. And yet Parrinder is a well-known science fiction critic. Is he ashamed of the genre? Does he, like so many other academics, consider it insignificant in the history of literature? Or would these works in some way spoil his thesis?

First published at LiveJournal, 30 September 2007.