Enlightenment Fiction & Novel

Enlightenment fiction includes novels, imaginary voyages, and narrative satire that developed during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Defoe’s accounts of resourcefulness and experience, Richardson’s use of letters, and Fielding’s expansive comic narration offer different ways of representing an individual life. Swift’s imaginary societies turn travel narrative into a means of examining human pride and public institutions. Questions of conscience, education, wealth, and reputation recur across these forms. Their narrators are also important: what a speaker notices, excuses, or conceals can be as revealing as the events being described.