This book examines the writing and manuscript publication of key authors from 1550 to 1800.

This volume gathers three novels along with other important work by Jane Barker (1652-1732), a writer, manager of farm property, Roman Catholic convert, Jacobite in exile in France, and woman unmarried by choice.

Winner of the Christian Gauss Award for excellence in literary scholarship from the Phi Beta Kappa Society Having excavated the world's earliest novels in his previous book, literary historian Steven Moore explores in this sequel the remarkable flowering of the novel between the years 1600 and 1800-from Don Quixote to America's first big novel, an homage to Cervantes entitled Modern Chivalry. This is the period of such classic novels as Tom Jones, Candide, and Dangerous Liaisons, but beyond the dozen or so recognized classics there are hundreds of other interesting novels that appeared then, known only to specialists: Spanish picaresques, French heroic romances, massive Chinese novels, Japanese graphic novels, eccentric English novels, and the earliest American novels. These minor novels are not only interesting in their own right, but also provide the context needed to appreciate why the major novels were major breakthroughs. The novel experienced an explosive growth spurt during these centuries as novelists experimented with different forms and genres: epistolary novels, romances, Gothic thrillers, novels in verse, parodies, science fiction, episodic road trips, and family sagas, along with quirky, unclassifiable experiments in fiction that resemble contemporary, avant-garde works. As in his previous volume, Moore privileges the innovators and outriders, those who kept the novel novel. In the most comprehensive history of this period ever written, Moore examines over 400 novels from around the world in a lively style that is as entertaining as it is informative. Though written for a general audience, The Novel, An Alternative History also provides the scholarly apparatus required by the serious student of the period. This sequel, like its predecessor, is a “zestfully encyclopedic, avidly opinionated, and dazzlingly fresh history of the most 'elastic' of literary forms” (Booklist).

Although the emergence of the English novel is generally regarded as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, this is the first book to be published professing to cover the 'eighteenth-century English novel' in its entirety. This Handbook surveys the development of the English novel during the 'long' eighteenth century-in other words, from the later seventeenth century right through to the first three decades of the nineteenth century when, with the publication of the novels of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, 'the novel' finally gained critical acceptance and assumed the position of cultural hegemony it enjoyed for over a century. By situating the novels of the period which are still read today against the background of the hundreds published between 1660 and 1830, this Handbook not only covers those 'masters and mistresses' of early prose fiction-such as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney, Scott and Austen-who are still acknowledged to be seminal figures in the emergence and development of the English novel, but also the significant number of recently-rediscovered novelists who were popular in their own day. At the same time, its comprehensive coverage of cultural contexts not considered by any existing study, but which are central to the emergence of the novel, such as the book trade and the mechanics of book production, copyright and censorship, the growth of the reading public, the economics of culture both in London and in the provinces, and the re-printing of popular fiction after 1774, offers unique insight into the making of the English novel.

With this well-illustrated new volume, the SECC continues its tradition of publishing innovative interdisciplinary scholarship on the interpretive edge. Essays include: Misty Anderson, Our Purpose is the Same: Whitefield, Foote, and the Theatricality of MethodismTili Boon Cuillé, La Vraisemblance du merveilleux: Operatic Aesthetics in Cazotte's Fantastic FictionSimon Dickie, Joseph Andrews and the Great Laughter Debate: The Roasting of AdamsLynn Festa, Cosmetic Differences: The Changing Faces of England and FranceBlake Gerard, All that the heart wishes: Changing Views toward Sentimentality Reflected in Visualizations of Sterne's Maria, 1773-1888Jennifer Keith, The Sins of Sensibility and the Challenge of Antislavery PoetryMary Helen McMurran, Aphra Behn from Both Sides: Translation in the Atlantic WorldLeslie Richardson, Leaving her Father's House: Locke, Astell, and Clarissa's Body PoliticSandra Sherman, The Wealth of Nations in the 1790sAlan Sikes, Snip Snip Here, Snip Snip There, and a Couple of Tra La Las: The Rise and Fall of the Castrato SingerRivka Swenson, Representing Modernity in Jane Barker's Galesia Trilogy: Jacobite Allegory and the Aesthetics of the Patch-Work Subject

Sarah Prescott discusses the careers of a number of key women writers of the period from 1690 to 1740, exploring the role played by geographical location, literary circles, patronage, the literary marketplace, and subscription publication in shaping patterns of female authorship. The volume also provides a wealth of detail about the circumstances which affected the careers of individual women as well as investigating the marketing, reception, and self-representation of women writers in general.