This new study of the origins of the English novel argues that the novel emerged from historical writing. Examining historical writers and forms frequently neglected by earlier scholars, Robert Mayer shows that in the seventeenth century historical discourse embraced not only "h…
A footprint materializes mysteriously on a deserted shore; a giant helmet falls from the sky; a traveler awakens to find his horse dangling from a church steeple. Eighteenth-century fiction brims with moments such as these, in which the prosaic rubs up against the marvelous. Whi…
The sentimental novel in the eighteenth century
"This volume aims to present an authoritative and suggestive exploration of the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century. Sentimental novels reached the height of their vogue in the 1770s and 1780s and were still popular in the 1790s. Their origins may be traced to the so-cal…
"The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen traces the novel's relation to the theater over the course of the long eighteenth century, arguing that the familiar account of the novel as 'new' and distinct from other literary genres risks distorting a true…
