02 CAC TTH6 12149 LUPTON MU-208
Building a (Fictional) World in the Eighteenth Century
When we think of world building today, we imagine the construction of fictional and fantasy worlds adjacent to our own – perhaps in fiction, perhaps in games or media environments. In the 1700s, writers were just beginning to imagine what it might be to create a believable, lived-in fictional world that would mirror their own. They were developing techniques of description, visualization, mapping, and characterization that made the novel feel like a space one could move around in and believe in. But building credible fictional worlds was never just a matter of mimesis. As we think about the history of the early novel as realist, we’ll also explore the way fiction made it possible to imagine alternative realities, subject to their own rules and restraints – worlds better than the one eighteenth-century writers lived in, or representative of ones constructed as lost.
We’ll read Daniel Defoe’s, Robinson Crusoe; Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall, Edgeworth’s Angeline, Austen’s Emma, Walter Scott’s Waverly and a selection of life writing and descriptive writing from the period. Our theorists will include Eric Hayot on world-building, Cynthia Wall on description, Erich Auberbach and on Mimesis, and Marcie Frank on ‘Situation.’ Students will be invited to work practically on building and interacting with a fictional world.