The Enlightenment Novel
Before the novel settled into convention, the eighteenth century used it as a philosophical instrument: send a naive traveler through escalating catastrophes and see what survives of his optimism. Six books escalate from satire's broadest comedy to Richardson's claustrophobic tragedy, built letter by letter.
Gulliver's TravelsJonathan Swift · 1726
Lvl 5320ppSwift marches a naive surgeon through increasingly monstrous societies, each one a distorting mirror held up to home: satire's most quotable, most re-readable machine.
ZadigVoltaire · 1747
Lvl 3100ppVoltaire's short, witty philosophical tale tests a wise man's luck against pure Enlightenment optimism, in under a hundred pages.
Manon LescautAbbé Prévost · 1731
Lvl 4160ppAbbé Prévost's doomed romance runs reason's confidence straight into obsessive, ruinous love: the era's coolest philosophy meeting its least reasonable subject.
Jacques the FatalistDenis Diderot · 1796
Lvl 6250ppDiderot interrupts his own master-and-servant road story constantly to argue about free will versus fate: metafiction, decades before anyone called it that.
Tom JonesHenry Fielding · 1749
Lvl 5890ppFielding's foundling gets a picaresque education across the whole breadth of English society, plotted with the ironic precision of a machine built to catch him falling.
ClarissaSamuel Richardson · 1748
Lvl 61500ppThe capstone, and the era's tragic extreme: Richardson builds a single trapped consciousness's case letter by letter, in real time, until the epistolary novel becomes unbearable; reason offers no rescue.