The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel

A comprehensive and innovative guide to the British novel in its formative decades.

John Richetti (Edited by)

9780521419086, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 September 1996

300 pages
23.6 x 15.7 x 2.4 cm, 0.598 kg

' … this is a collection that students of the English novel of this period will find useful as an introduction and as a guide to current opinion'. Forum for Modern Language Studies

In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern world of print culture. Sentimental and Gothic fiction and fiction by women are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Burney. This multifaceted picture of the novel in its formative decades provides a comprehensive and indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century British novel, and its place within the culture of its time.

1. Introduction John Richetti
2. The novel and social/cultural history J. Paul Hunter
3. Defoe as an innovator of fictional form Max Novak
4. Gulliver's Travels and the contracts of fiction Michael Seidel
5. Samuel Richardson: fiction and knowledge Margaret Anne Doody
6. Henry Fielding Claude Rawson
7. Sterne and irregular rhetoric Jonathan Lamb
8. Smollett's Humphry Clinker Michael Rosenblum
9. The romance in Frances Burney's novels Julia Epstein
10. Women writers and the eighteenth-century novel Jane Spencer
11. Sentimental novels John Mullan
12. Enlightenment, popular culture and Gothic fiction James Carson.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]