This is the story of a most ingenious invention: the novel. Desribed for the first time in The Rise of The Novel, Ian Watt's landmark classic reveals the origins and explains the success of the most popular literary form of all time. In the space of a single generation, three eighteenth-century writers -- Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding -- invented an entirely new genre of writing: the novel. With penetrating and original readings of their works, as well as those of Jane Austen, who further developed and popularised it, he explains why these authors wrote in the way that they did, and how the complex changes in society – the emergence of the middle-class and the new social position of women – gave rise to its success. Heralded as a revelation when it first appeared, The Rise of The Novel remains one of the most widely read and enjoyable books of literary criticism ever written, capturing precisely and satisfyingly what it is about the form that so enthrals us.

Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel. More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.

In this challening book, Firdous Azim, provides a feminist critique of orthodox accounts of the `rise of the novel' and exposes the underlying orientalist assumptions of the early English novel. Whereas previous studies have emphasized the universality of the coherent and consistent subject which found expression in the novels of the eighteenth century, Azim demonstrtes how certain categories: women and people of colour, were silenced and excluded. The Colonial Rise of the Novel makes an important and provocative contribution to post-colonial and feminist criticism. It will be essential reading for all teachers and students of English literature, women's studies, and post-colonial criticism.

Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered beginswith the brute fact that poetry jostledup alongside novels in the bookstallsof eighteenth-century England. Indeed,by exploringunexpected collisions and collusionsbetween poetry and novels, this volumeof exciting, new essays offers a reconsideration of the literary and cultural history of the period. Thenovel poached from and featured poetry, and the “modern” subjects and objects privileged by “rise of the novel” scholarship are only one part of a world full of animate things and people with indistinct boundaries. Contributors: Margaret Doody, David Fairer, Sophie Gee, Heather Keenleyside, ShelleyKing, Christina Lupton, Kate Parker, Natalie Phillips, Aran Ruth, Wolfram Schmidgen, Joshua Swidzinski, and Courtney Weiss Smith.

A literary scholar explains how eighteenth-century novels were manufactured, sold, bought, owned, collected, and read alongside Protestant religious texts. As the novel developed into a mature genre, it had to distinguish itself from these similar-looking books and become what we now call “literature.” Literary scholars have explained the rise of the Anglophone novel using a range of tools, from Ian Watt’s theories to James Watt’s inventions. Contrary to established narratives, When Novels Were Books reveals that the genre beloved of so many readers today was not born secular, national, middle-class, or female. For the first three centuries of their history, novels came into readers’ hands primarily as printed sheets ordered into a codex bound along one edge between boards or paper wrappers. Consequently, they shared some formal features of other codices, such as almanacs and Protestant religious books produced by the same printers. Novels are often mistakenly credited for developing a formal feature (“character”) that was in fact incubated in religious books. The novel did not emerge all at once: it had to differentiate itself from the goods with which it was in competition. Though it was written for sequential reading, the early novel’s main technology for dissemination was the codex, a platform designed for random access. This peculiar circumstance led to the genre’s insistence on continuous, cover-to-cover reading even as the “media platform” it used encouraged readers to dip in and out at will and read discontinuously. Jordan Alexander Stein traces this tangled history, showing how the physical format of the book shaped the stories that were fit to print.

A classic description of the interworkings of social conditions changing attitudes, and literary practices during the period when the novel emerged as the dominant literary form of the individualist era.

Martin Turnell's The Rise of the French Novel is a successor to his highly praised earlier books, The Novel in France (1951) and The Art of French Fiction (1959). His aim now, however, is somewhat different, as can be seen from the title. It is well known that the reputations of many writers, novelists especially, diminish for a period following their deaths. Although in the eighteenth century Marivaux, Crébillon fils, and Rousseau all enjoyed a great deal of popularity during their lifetimes, it is only recently that they have been subject to truly searching studies. Yet they remain little read in English-speaking countries. Turnell emphasizes that in spite of the hostility of French critics and the fact that the novel did not reach its supremacy even in France until the nineteenth century, the beginning of its great rise was indeed with such writers as these. Their strong influence led such nineteenth-century novelists as Stendhal and Flaubert to all kinds of changes related to style, the enormous increase in the range of subject matter, and the marked development of language. Flaubert is the most striking example. It was pointed out some time ago by Eisenstein that Madame Bovary anticipates cinematic technique. One of Turnell's most interesting chapters explores the connections between the novel and film in general, and Madame Bovary in particular. In our own time, two of the most popular French novelists in both the United States and England are Alain-Fournier and Radiguet. They are given enthusiastic appreciations in Turnell's thoughtful book.