Eighteenth-Century Fiction

The Oriental Captivity Narrative and Early English Fiction Joe Snader While colonial and postcolonial issues have generated much recent literary scholarship on the nineteenth and twentieth-century novel, the relationship between empire and the earlier development of the English novel has not received the attention it deserves. This is particularly surprising when we consider the enormous expansion of British power during the eighteenth century and the period's wealth of novels commenting or focusing on alien lands. Nevertheless, recent studies of the generic predecessors of the English novel, even as they revise, extend, and complicate Ian Watt's seminal formulation ofthe novel's origins, still tend to downplay empire in their emphasis on English domesticity, English class formation, empirical epistemology, and an implicitly English psychological inferiority.1 Although students of eighteenth-century literature have begun to explore issues of empire in increasing depth, they have generally explored the relationship between the novel and British colonial expansion by reading individual texts, especially Oroonoko and 1 Ian Watt, The Rise ofthe Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). For epistemology and class, see Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); and Michael McKeon, The Origins ofthe English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). J. Paul Hunter has identified a wide range of textual genres which anticipated the novel's construction of self and world; see Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts ofEighteenthCentury English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990). For domesticity, see Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 9, Number 3, April 1997 268 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Robinson Crusoe.2 The candidacy of these texts for the position of "first novel" has contributed to broadly theorized but insufficiently illustrated claims about British imperialism and the origins of the English novel, particularly in terms of a connection between the discursive strategies of empire and the novel's reliance on a voice of realistic, factual, or empirical authority.3 If we shift our attention, however, from individual texts to generic patterns, we can find much more concrete and extensive connections between the early novel and colonialist strategies of discursive domination. One important connection developed as early English novelists borrowed , intensified, and recast the plot structures, individualistic heroism, and colonialist agenda of the Oriental captivity narrative. Published frequently in England from the late sixteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century, factual narratives of Oriental captivity record the experiences of Europeans captured and enslaved in various Islamic states, especially the corsair enclaves of the Barbary coast. Usually merchants and seamen, the captives voice indignant denunciations of the "despotic" and "barbaric" peoples who have interrupted their trade in alien waters. As the captives describe their subjugation to foreign masters, their isolation from home within an alien environment, and their self-reliant efforts to regain native "English liberties," their voices of individualistic autonomy take shape against a detailed representation of the Orient as debased and despotic. Both the debased Oriental setting and the plot of subjugation and escape enforce an expansionist ideology by suggesting that autonomous and self-reliant Western captives possess a natural right and ability to resist and control the alien cultures that have enslaved them. Following this narrative pattern, such writers as Penelope Aubin and 2 Exceptions include work on anti-slavery novels, such as Wylie Sypher, Guinea's Captives Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature ofthe Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), pp. 257-316; and Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992). Percy Adams's focus on the connections between novel and travel writing in general tends to downplay the specific impact of colonial expansion; see Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983). 3 Lennard Davis, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 52-85, and "The Fact of Events and the Event of Facts: New World Explorers and the Early Novel," Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 32 (1991), 240-55; Firdous Azim, The Colonial...