Novel Definitions: An Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688-1815 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551116464 ISBN 13: 9781551116464

Publisher: Broadview Press, 2009

Synopsis

Novel Definitions captures the lively critical debate surrounding the invention of the English novel, showing how the rise of the novel was accompanied by a rise in popular literary criticism. The anthology collects over 135 primary sources that chart the long eighteenth century’s interpretation of the novel. These sources―many newly-discovered―include essays, prefaces, reviews, and sermons written by authors ranging from Aphra Behn to Walter Scott. Novel Definitions brings together authors’ prefatory analyses of their work; essayists’ debates concerning the novel’s formal qualities; commentators’ questions concerning the novel’s cultural position, including whether or not women and children should read novels; reviewers’ definitions of the qualities that make a novel successful; and literary historians’ first attempts to write the history of the novel.

About this title

About the Author

Cheryl L. Nixon is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Review

“[Novel Definitions] is essential reading in both the culture and theory of novel writing and reading during the eighteenth century. Our courses on the eighteenth-century novel and our writing about the novel will be much the better for its appearance.” ― Jonathan Kramnick, Studies in English Literature

“Cheryl Nixon’s Novel Definitions is an extremely useful, comprehensive, and very well-organized anthology of responses, both professional and popular, to the English novel in the period of its cultural ascendency. Both in its range―which covers major statements about the developing genre from Huet and Behn through Reeve and Barbauld―and in its depth―which places well-known texts by writers such as Richardson and Johnson alongside a wealth of less familiar criticism and commentary―Novel Definitions offers an indispensible resource for teaching and researching the history of the novel in eighteenth-century Britain.” ― Scott Black, University of Utah

“In this superb anthology, both learned and lively, Cheryl Nixon provides a thoughtful and theoretically informed introduction to the critical commentaries that shaped the debate over the meaning of the “new” novel. Authors and critics became cultural commentators, members of a cultural community all too aware of what was at stake in their new form...This collection is invaluable for a study of the novel and of eighteenth-century British culture.” ― Carol Flynn, Tufts University

“Cheryl Nixon’s invaluable Novel Definitions gathers vast and rich commentary that expands our understanding of eighteenth-century novels. With a superb introduction, Novel Definitions is intelligently designed and thoughtfully organized, schematizing its numerous materials into formal and thematic categories that foreground the experimental and provocative nature of the genre in its earliest incarnations. Students of the eighteenth-century novel will want to read all these prefaces, critical essays, commentaries and book reviews, for they illuminate the important controversies and vexing debates that preoccupied the eighteenth-century reading public. Novel Definitions is an outstanding edition of rarely-collected material that should be required reading.” ― Tita Chico, University of Maryland

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1551116464
• ISBN 13: 9781551116464
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 438
• Editor: Nixon Cheryl L.