Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Authorship from Manuscript to Print

Recovers and analyzes novel manuscripts and post-publication revisions to construct a new narrative about eighteenth-century authorship.

Hilary Havens (Author)

9781108725613, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 July 2021

242 pages, 2 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15 x 1.3 cm, 0.36 kg

'Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel remains an important entry in a growing body of scholarship on eighteenth-century manuscripts and literary circles. Taken together, this may do for the novel what twentieth-century criticism did for early modern drama-demonstrating that the text is not a singular 'event' emerging from a singular great voice, but an ever-shifting network of processes, responses and contributions that can open up fresh interpretative possibilities.' Natasha Simonova, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats

Revisions form a natural part of the writing process, but is the concept of revision actually an intrinsic part of the formation of the novel genre? Through the recovery and analysis of material from novel manuscripts and post-publication revisions, Hilary Havens identifies a form of 'networked authorship'. By tracing authors' revisions to their novels, the influence of familial and literary circles, reviewers, and authors' own previous writings can be discerned. Havens focuses on the work of Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, and Maria Edgeworth to challenge the individualistic view of authorship that arose during the Romantic period, and argues that networked authorship shaped the composition of eighteenth-century novels. Exploring these themes of collaboration and social networks, as well as engaging with the burgeoning trend towards textual recovery, this work is an important contribution in the study of eighteenth-century novels and their manuscript counterparts.

1. Samuel Richardson: 'fan fiction' and networked authorship
2. Frances Burney: obliterations and unending revisions
3. Jane Austen: revision as empowerment
4. Maria Edgeworth: scientific knowledge, didactic moralism, and her 'family jury of critics'.

Subject Areas: Publishing industry & book trade [KNTP], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literature: history & criticism [DS]