This entertaining novel’s full title, which claims that it will show “All the Artifices and Strategems which the Ladies of Pleasure make use of for the Intreaguing and Decoying of Men,” suggests that it is a cautionary tale. And in fact, The London Jilt is presented as the memoir of a courtesan by an anonymous editor who justifies its publication as a warning to young men. Yet the narrative is remarkable for its time in allowing the “jilt” to speak for herself, and she tells the much more sympathetic story of a woman who turns to prostitution only after her father is cheated out of his estate and she is thrust into the world without resources. Her struggles are as much economic as they are sexual, and include encounters with a wide variety of amorous but unsatisfactory men. This Broadview edition provides a critical introduction, commentary, explanatory notes, and appendices that incorporate selections from related contemporary works, including Spanish picaresque novels in which the narrator is a woman.

This entertaining novel’s full title, which claims that it will show “All the Artifices and Strategems which the Ladies of Pleasure make use of for the Intreaguing and Decoying of Men,” suggests that it is a cautionary tale. And in fact, The London Jilt is presented as the memoir of a courtesan by an anonymous editor who justifies its publication as a warning to young men. Yet the narrative is remarkable for its time in allowing the “jilt” to speak for herself, and she tells the much more sympathetic story of a woman who turns to prostitution only after her father is cheated out of his estate and she is thrust into the world without resources. Her struggles are as much economic as they are sexual, and include encounters with a wide variety of amorous but unsatisfactory men. This Broadview edition provides a critical introduction, commentary, explanatory notes, and appendices that incorporate selections from related contemporary works, including Spanish picaresque novels in which the narrator is a woman.

Novel horizons analyses how narrative prose fiction developed during the English Restoration. It argues that after 1660, generic changes within dramatic texts occasioned an intense debate within prologues and introductions. This discussion about the poetics of a genre was echoed in the paratextual material of prose fictions. In the absence of an official poetics that defined prose fiction, paratexts fulfilled this function and informed readers about the budding genre. This study traces the piecemeal development of these boundaries and describes the generic competence of readers through the analysis of paratexts and prose fictions. Novel horizons covers the surviving textual material widely, focusing on narrative prose fictions published between 1660 and 1710. In addition to tracing the paratextual poetics of Restoration fiction, this book also covers the state of the art of fiction-writing during the period, discussing character development, narrative point of view and questions of fictionality and realism.

This book examines the theories and practices of narrative and drama in England between 1650 and 1700, a period that, in bridging the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, has been comparatively neglected, and on which, at the time of writing, there is a dearth of new approaches. Critical consensus over these two genres has failed to account for its main features and evolution throughout the period in at least two ways. First, most approaches omit the manifold contradictions between the practice and the theory of a genre. Writers were generally aware of working within a tradition of representation which they nevertheless often challenged, even while the theory was being drafted (e.g., by John Dryden). The ideal and the real were in unacknowledged conflict. Second, critical readings of these late Stuart texts have fitted them proactively into a neat evolutionary pattern that reached eighteenth-century genres without detours or disjunctions, or else they have oversimplified the wealth of generic conventions deployed in the period, so that to the present-day reader, for instance, Restoration drama consists only of either city comedies or Dryden's tragedies. A cursory survey of the critical history of seventeenth-century drama and fiction confirms these views. Although the 1970s and 1980s brought about a crop of interesting reassessments of the field, fiction continues to be seen as a genre that emerged in the eighteenth century. Most critics still treat earlier manifestations as marginal or as prenovelistic experiments; and in most instances it is even possible to discern a sexist bias to justify this treatment, as these works were written by women, unlike much of the canonical fiction of the eighteenth century. A revision of the critical foundations hitherto held and a re-evaluation of the works of fiction written in the seventeenth century is therefore in order. This study adopts, as a basic and essential methodological tenet, the need to decenter the analysis of Restoration fiction and drama from the traditional canon, too limited and conservative and featuring works that are not always suitable as paradigmatic instances of the literary production of the period. These studies have thus been based on a larger than usual--if not on a full--corpus of works produced within the period, and have sought to ascertain the role played in the development of each of the genres under consideration by works, topics, or even by authors hitherto somewhat outside mainstream literary criticism. This opens the field of English literature further through the framing of new questions or revising of old ones, as well as to beginning a dialogue, yet again, as to the meanings of these literary works and also to their circulation from their inception up to the present time. In addition, the rare attention given to works by women makes this all the more an important book for collections in English literature of the period.

"This collection of essays casts new light at Aphra Behn's poetry, drama, prose and literary criticism. The contributors analyse her creative response to the literary theories, genres and motifs of her age and point out remarkable analogies to the writings of her female successors, some of whom have not hitherto been viewed in relation to this Restoration pioneer of female authorship. Her influence on modern writers can still be felt in texts as diverse as Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Molly Brown's historical thriller set in Restoration England, and Joan Anim-Addo's adaptation of Oroonoko."--Publisher's description.

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).

Writing and Fantasy brings together essays which restore a sense of the fantastic as a political response to cultural opportunities and pressures. It moves on from two conventional fields of discussion: the psychoanalytic, where phantasies are produced by the emergence of the consciousness, and the social, where fantasies are the production of nineteenth-century individualism. Chapters run from the classical period to the twentieth century, each focusing on a local reading of how fantasy acts as a strategy to contain or exploit specific historical and cultural moments. A wide variety of sites are investigated including the feminization of the wild west, originary and maternal spaces, highwaywomen, financial credit, and the ideal home. Multiple genres containing fantasy are explored, ranging from ghost stories to feminist utopias. Aids to the reader include an introduction summarising recent discussions of fantasy, illustrations dealing with visual fantasies, and an annotated bibliography. The new research presented here will be of great interest to academics and students in literature, history and cultural studies departments who are working in the field of the historical development of concepts of fantasy, cultural opposition, and the imbrication of politics and modes of representation.