The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century NovelJohn Richetti 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. |
Contents
List of Contributors | ix |
Chronology | xi |
Introduction | 1 |
The novel and socialcultural history | 9 |
Defoe as an innovator of fictional form | 41 |
Gullivers Travels and the contracts of fiction | 72 |
Samuel Richardson fiction and knowledge | 90 |
Henry Fielding | 120 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
adventure Bramble Burney Burney's Cambridge Companion Captain Singleton Cecilia century characters Clarissa Cleopatra comic contemporary critics Defoe Defoe's domestic early edited eighteenth eighteenth-century novel eloquence England English Enlightenment Evelina feeling female fiction Fielding's France Frances Burney genre Gothic fiction Gothic novel Grandison Gulliver Gulliver's Travels Henry Fielding hero heroine human Humphry Clinker ideal imagination John Jones Joseph Andrews kind Lady Laurence Sterne letters literary lives London Lovelace male Marchmont marriage modern Moll Flanders moral narrative narrator nature novelists Oxford University Press Pamela parody particular Patriot political popular culture published readers reading representation represented Robinson Crusoe romance Roxana Samuel Richardson Sarah Fielding satiric scene seems sense sentimental novel sexual Shamela Sir Charles Smollett social society Sterne Sterne's story Swift tell texts things tion Tobias Smollett Tom Jones traditional Tristram Shandy virtue volume woman women writing Yorick York young