| Contents |
Part I. Fiction in the marketplace. Authorship, publication, reception (1) : 1470-1660 / Paul Salzman -- Authorship, publication, reception (2) : 1660-1750 / Robert D. Hume -- Cross-sections (1) : 1516-1520 / Cathy Shrank -- Cross-sections (2) : 1596-1600 / Lori Humphrey Newcomb -- Cross-sections (3) : 1666-1670 / James Grantham Turner -- Cross-sections (4) : 1716-1720 / Pat Rogers -- Part II. Early modern fiction--sources and modes. Fiction and the origins of print / Alexandra Gillespie -- English fiction and the ancient novel / Robert H.F. Carver -- Chivalric romance and novella collections / Helen Moore -- Euphuism and courtly fiction / Nandini Das -- Nashe and satire / Tiffany Stern -- Elizabethan popular romance and the popular novel / R.W. Maslen -- 'The conjunction cannot be hurtful'? : Sidney's Arcadia and mingled genres / Gavin Alexander -- Utopian fiction / Daniel Carey -- Royalist romance? / Steven N. Zwicker -- Picaresque and rogue fiction / Simon Dickie -- Cervantes, anti-romance, and the novella / Brean Hammond -- Rabelaisian comedy and satire / Nicholas McDowell -- Bunyan and religious allegory / Michael Davies -- Part III. Restoration fiction and the rise of the novel. Formal experimentation and theories of fiction / Nicholas Hudson -- Non-fictional discourses and the novel / John Richetti -- Finding their accounts : autobiography, novel, and the move from self 'to you-ward' / Stuart Sherman -- Classical French fiction and the restoration novel / Ros Ballaster -- Epistolary fiction / Toni Bowers -- Pornography and the novel / Paul Baines -- Restoration theatre and the novel / Jenny Davidson -- Exploration, expansion, and the early novel / Cynthia Wall -- Arabian nights and Oriental spies / James Watt -- The rise of the Irish novel / Moyra Haslett -- Amatory and scandal fiction / Jane Spencer -- Defoe, journalism, and the early English novel : contexts and models / J. Paul Hunter -- Swift, satire, and the novel / Claude Rawson -- The Pamela debate / Thomas Lockwood -- Clarissa and Tom Jones / J.A. Downie -- 'Moral romance' and the novel at mid-century / Peter Sabor. |
| Abstract |
Explores the long period between the origins of printing in late fifteenth-century England and the establishment of the novel as a recognized, reputable genre in the mid eighteenth century. Later chapters in the volume provide original, authoritative accounts of innovations by the major canonical authors, notably Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, who have traditionally been seen as pioneering "the rise of the novel," in Ian Watt's famous phrase. With its extended chronological and geographical range, however, the volume also contextualizes these eighteenth-century developments in revelatory new ways, to provide a fresh, bold, and comprehensive account of the richness and variety of fictional traditions as they developed over two and half centuries. This volume thus establishes newly comprehensive mapping of early fiction that rectifies the shortcomings and exclusions of established "rise of the novel" scholarship. These include the relative neglect of the importance of women writers, following Behn's reinvention of romance in the 1680s, in shaping novelistic themes and techniques; a restrictive generic definition based on circumstantial and psychological realism to the exclusion of non-realist modes that flourished for centuries beforehand; a teleological bias that overlooks or downgrades phases and types of fiction production, such as the richly variegated category of Elizabethan fiction, that resist being assimilated into narratives of evolution or ascent; a reductive Anglocentrism that leaves out of account the translation, reception, and pervasive influence form the sixteenth century onwards of, among much else, the "ancient novel" of Apuleius and Heliodorus; Byzantine, Arabian, and Eastern traditions; the Italian novella from Boccaccio to Bandello; Spanish picaresque and anti-romance; and a range of French narrative modes from Rabelais to Marivaux. Alongside these key contexts, the volume treats the emergent novel as, above all, a phenomenon of print culture, with close attention to conditions of authorship, publishing, and reading across the extended period. |
