The English novel written between 1700 and 1740 remains a comparatively neglected area. In addition to Daniel Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders are landmarks in the history of English fiction, many other authors were at work. These included such women as Penelope Aubin, Jane Barker, Mary Davys, and Eliza Haywood, who made a considerable contribution to widening the range of emotional responses in fiction. These authors, and many others, continued writing in the genres inherited from the previous century, such as criminal biographies, the Utopian novel, the science fictional voyage, and the epistolary novel. This annotated bibliography includes entries for these works and for critical materials pertinent to them. The volume first seeks to establish the existing studies of the era, along with anthologies. It then provides entries for a wide-ranging selection of works which cover fictional, theoretical, historical, political, and cultural topics, to provide a comprehensive background to the unfolding and understanding of prose fiction in the early 18th century. This is followed by an alphabetical listing of novels, their editions, and any critical material available on each. The next section provides a chronological record of significant and enduring works of fiction composed or translated in this period. The volume concludes with extensive indexes.

Examining the Victorian serial as a text in its own right, Catherine Delafield re-reads five novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Dinah Craik and Wilkie Collins by situating them in the context of periodical publication. She traces the roles of the author and editor in the creation and dissemination of the texts and considers how first publication affected the consumption and reception of the novel through the periodical medium. Delafield contends that a novel in volume form has been separated from its original context, that is, from the pattern of consumption and reception presented by the serial. The novel's later re-publication still bears the imprint of this serialized original, and this book’s investigation into nineteenth-century periodicals both generates new readings of the texts and reinstates those which have been lost in the reprinting process. Delafield's case studies provide evidence of the ways in which Household Words, Cornhill Magazine, Good Words, All the Year Round and Cassell's Magazine were designed for new audiences of novel readers. Serialization and the Novel in Mid-Victorian Magazines addresses the material conditions of production, illustrates the collective and collaborative creation of the serialized novel, and contextualizes a range of texts in the nineteenth-century experience of print.

Early novelists such as Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe, and Laurence Sterne helped create the formula for the modern novel.

British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms, and the Gothic Novel, 1764-1824 considers three interlocking developments of this period: the emergence of the Gothic novel at a time when national upheavals required the construction of a new nationalist identity, the Gothic novel's redefinition of heroes and heroism in that nationalist debate, and changes within class and gender as well as audience and author relations. The scope of this study extends beyond the confines of the novel proper to include chapbooks and illustrated redactions.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture—a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people’s very structures of feeling, their ways of doing and being. In what is sure to become a critical classic, An Archaeology of Sympathy challenges Sergei Eisenstein’s influential account of Dickens and early American film by tracing the unexpected history and intricate strategies of the sentimental mode and showing how it has been reimagined over the past three centuries. James Chandler begins with a look at Frank Capra and the Capraesque in American public life, then digs back to the eighteenth century to examine the sentimental substratum underlying Dickens and early cinema alike. With this surprising move, he reveals how literary spectatorship in the eighteenth century anticipated classic Hollywood films such as Capra’s It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and It’s a Wonderful Life. Chandler then moves forward to romanticism and modernism—two cultural movements often seen as defined by their rejection of the sentimental—examining how authors like Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf actually engaged with sentimental forms and themes in ways that left a mark on their work. Reaching from Laurence Sterne to the Coen brothers, An Archaeology of Sympathy casts new light on the long eighteenth century and the novelistic forebears of cinema and our modern world.

This volume offers a revaluation of the work of Romantic-era Scottish writer John Galt. Galt traveled throughout the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds and founded the Canadian city of Guelph while remaining in touch with local cultures and politics in Scotland and England. He wrote fiction, drama, and biography based on his personal observations of life and in ways that associated him with the “theoretical” or “conjectural” methods of Scottish Enlightenment historiographers. Galt’s insights into the societies he inhabited and visited, his perceptions of political extremism and class conflict, his attitudes toward community building and progress, his convictions about determinism and historical revisionism, his strategies for manipulating literary genres and readers’ responses, and his ambivalence about the value of literature deserve consideration in light of new thinking in our own fields about what constitutes social knowledge and viable ways to represent it. The essays in this volume examine Galt’s work in light of the convergence of literature, history, and social theory in Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic-era culture and in our own interdisciplinary environment. Discussing Galt’s work and significance in the many areas, genres, and contexts in which he figures, they broaden the circle of contacts with whom we associate Galt, moving from expected comparisons with contemporaries Walter Scott and James Hogg to unexpected links with such later authors and social thinkers as George Douglas Brown and Harriet Martineau. Moreover, these essays expand the repertoire of works studied, offering the first extended analyses of Eben Erskine, Rothelan, and the Travels and Observations of Hareach, the Wandering Jew along with new readings of Annals of the Parish, Bogle Corbet, and Ringan Gilhaize. Overall, the essays draw out the implications of Galt’s practices and relations as a journalist, dramatist, critic, biographer, and novelist, developing grounded conjectures about their significance in Galt’s time and our own.

In the mid-eighteenth century, Sarah Fielding (1710-68) was the second most popular English woman novelist, rivaled only by Eliza Haywood. The History of Ophelia, the last of her seven novels, is an often comic epistolary fiction, narrated by the heroine to an unnamed female correspondent in the form of a single protracted letter. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and valuable appendices that contain contemporary reviews of the novel, Richard Corbould's illustrations to the Novelist’s Magazine edition, and excerpts from Sarah Fielding’s Remarks on Clarissa.

Studies the experiences of sympathy that literary characters share with each other and argues that between 1750 and 1850, key works of British and French fiction generated a specific version of sympathy by manipulating traditional narrative forms and new publication practices in response to the Enlightenment.

A history of fable in written and illustrative media from classical times to 1800 and beyond.