The Novel and Cultural Encounters: Colonialism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Other

Resumen

This chapter aims to discuss the significance of Britain’s growing global involvement in the long eighteenth century for the development of the novel as a genre, including the role of the Other (Catholic as well as non-European) and affirmative and/or divergent perspectives from colonial and Enlightenment thinking. It is divided into five sections. The first two outline major critical approaches to the novel in the long eighteenth century from postcolonial perspectives and identify those aspects of British everyday life that were connected to the literary representation of other cultures and peoples. The subsequent three sections describe the impact of these cultural encounters through a range of works and with a focus on three major topics: slavery, colonization, and the Orient.