New romance", 1700-1800

The early eighteenth century — with the novel diving into private and public scandal — had reached a state of affairs where a new reform seemed desirable. The old Amadis could be said to have driven its readers into dream worlds, and the new novels, devoid of lofty speeches and incredible acts of heroism, had done much to refine taste. Yet they had created entirely new risks, with stories of love in which children cheated their parents, and with which private and public gossip were published on the open market.

Jane Barker was among the eighteenth century voices who demanded a return to the old antiquated romance. Her "new romance" Exilius (1715) opened with the sketch of a new tradition: the romance had, so Jane Barker claimed, developed from Geoffrey Chaucer to François Fénelon; the latter was the author who had just become famous with his epochal romance Telemachus (1699/1700).

Fénelon's English publishers had carefully avoided the term "romance" and rather published a "new epic in prose" — so the prefaces. Jane Barker insisted, however, on publishing Exilius as "New Romance [...] after the manner of Telemachus", and failed on the market. In 1719 her publisher, Edmund Curll, finally removed the old title pages and offered her works as a collection of novels.

The big market success of the next decade, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, appeared that very year and William Taylor, the publisher, avoided these traps with a title page claiming neither the realm of novels nor that of romances, but that of histories, yet with a page design tasting all too much of the "new romance" with which Fénelon had just become famous.

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was everything but a novel, as the term was understood at the time. It wasn't short, it didn't focus on an intrigue, and it wasn't told for the sake of a clear cut-point. Nor was Crusoe an anti-hero of a satirical romance, though he spoke in the first person singular and had stumbled into all kinds of miseries. He did not really invite laughter (though readers of taste would read, of course, all his proclamations about being a real man as made in good humour). The feigned author was serious: against his will his life had brought him into this series of most romantic adventures. He had fallen into the hands of pirates and survived years on an uninhabited island. He had survived all this — a mere sailor from York — with exemplary heroism. If readers read his work as a romance, full of sheer invention, he could not blame them. He and his publisher knew that all he had to tell was strictly unbelievable, and yet they would claim it was true (and if not, still readable as good allegory) — this is the complex game which puts this work into the fourth column of the pattern above