LITERARY SPACES ONLINE: OVERVIEW

The purpose of our exercises is both to allow you to learn more about the 18^th century and to teach you how and where to find out relevant and reliable information – it’s like not giving food to people but means to fish by themselves...

You are studying extracts from novels to which you can have full access online, to approach London in the 18^th century and compare the different views according to the authors. It will also allow you to travel to Bath and to Edinburgh, as far as Smollett is concerned. You will be invited to visit the course related to the part you are studying in the novel and thus be able to see the contemporary paintings, the music, the architecture, the society described in the novel. The purpose of a website, and before of a CDROM compared to a book, was to put all the facettes of a society together with the relevant links that allow to draw a full picture of the history of the period instead of studying its aspects separately.

Cities could be represented in literature in various ways; study the Literature section (Topics/Culture and the arts/Literature): 

• travelers would give accounts of the sights that struck them - in Bath for instance, chapter Descriptions of Bath  
• epistolary novels (i.e. novels made up of fictitious letters sent by the characters to one another) would serve to describe journeys undertaken by the characters writing home about their experiences in various cities - primarily Smollett's novels, with passages in London,  as well as Bath, and Edinburgh
• novels centred on a main character would make city adventures part of the narrative, where we can recognise the places visited, from Defoe's Moll Flanders  to Fielding's Tom Jones (both in London) and Jane Austen's novels taking place in Bath.