A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture

A Companion to the Eighteenth-century Novel furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral contexts.

• An up-to-date resource for the study of the eighteenth-century novel
  
• Furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral context
  
• Foregrounds those topics of most historical and political relevance to the twenty-first century
  
• Explores formative influences on the eighteenth-century novel, its engagement with the major issues and philosophies of the period, and its lasting legacy
  
• Covers both traditional themes, such as narrative authority and print culture, and cutting-edge topics, such as globalization, nationhood, technology, and science
  
• Considers both canonical and non-canonical literature
  

List of Illustrations viii

Notes on Contributors x

Introduction 1
Catherine Ingrassia

Shared Bibliography 18

PART ONE Formative Influences 23

1. "I have now done with my island, and all manner of discourse about it": Crusoe's Farther Adventures and the Unwritten History of the Novel 25
Robert Markley

2. Fiction/Translation/Transnation: The Secret History of the Eighteenth-Century Novel 48
Srinivas Aravamudan

3. Narrative Transmigrations: The Oriental Tale and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain 75
Ros Ballaster

4. Age of Peregrination: Travel Writing and the Eighteenth-Century Novel 97
Elizabeth Bohls

5. Milton and the Poetics of Ecstasy in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Fiction 117
Robert A. Erickson

6. Representing Resistance: British Seduction Stories, 1660–1800 140
Toni Bowers

PART TWO The World of the Eighteenth-Century Novel 165

7. Why Fanny Can’t Read: Joseph Andrews and the (Ir)relevance of Literacy 167
Paula McDowell

8. Memory and Mobility: Fictions of Population in Defoe, Goldsmith, and Scott 191
Charlotte Sussman

9. The Erotics of the Novel 214
James Grantham Turner

10. The Original American Novel, or, The American Origin of the Novel 235
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

11. New Contexts for Early Novels by Women: The Case of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and the Hillarians, 1719–1725 261
Kathryn R. King

12. Momentary Fame: Female Novelists in Eighteenth-Century Book Reviews 276
Laura Runge

13. Women, Old Age, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel 299
Devoney Looser

14. Joy and Happiness 321
Adam Potkay

PART THREE The Novel's Modern Legacy 341

15. The Eighteenth-Century Novel and Print Culture: A Proposed Modesty 343
Christopher Flint

16. An Emerging New Canon of the British Eighteenth-Century Novel: Feminist Criticism, the Means of Cultural Production, and the Question of Value 365
John Richetti

17. Queer Gothic 383
George E. Haggerty

18. Conversable Fictions 399
Kathryn Sutherland

19. Racial Legacies: The Speaking Countenance and the Character Sketch in the Novel 419
Roxann Wheeler

20. Home Economics: Representations of Poverty in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 441
Ruth Perry

21. Whatever Happened to the Gordon Riots? 459
Carol Houlihan Flynn

22. The Novel Body Politic 481
Susan S. Lanser

23. Literary Culture as Immediate Reality 504
Paula R. Backscheider

Index 539

"A team of two dozen prominent scholars ... .Here report on the state of the art in 18th century novel studies. Nearly all the work is cutting edge, and almost every page challenges conventional wisdom ... .Specialists in the early novel will find this wide-ranging and theoretically sophisticated work provocative. Highly recommended." CHOICE

“Editors Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia have assembled an impressive collection of authors … .Visiting or revisiting a complex cultural topography. ” ECF

"The Variety of texts treated in this volume is rich, unapologetic, and one of its real pleasures." The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies

Paula R. Backscheider is Philpott-Stevens Eminent Scholar at Auburn University. A former president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, she is best known as the author of Daniel Defoe: His Life (1992).

Catherine Ingrassia is Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England (1998).

A Companion to the Eighteenth-century English Novel and Culture provides an up-to-date resource for the study of this subject, foregrounding those topics of most historical and political relevance to the twenty-first century. It considers not only the canonical literature of the period, but also the non-canonical literature, and the contexts in which the eighteenth-century novel was produced.

The volume is divided into three parts exploring formative influences on the eighteenth-century novel, its engagement with the major issues and philosophies of the period, and its lasting legacy. Each of these three parts is structured around the same themes, including globalization, nationhood, technology, commerce, science, and lifestyles. This allows the Companion to capitalize on cutting-edge scholarship without obscuring traditional parameters for the study of the eighteenth-century novel, such as narrative authority, print culture, and the rise of the novel as a pan-European phenomenon.

The Companion as a whole furnishes readers exemplary cultural studies methodology and a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral contexts, and keeps them abreast of current critical trends in a field that has changed dramatically over the past decade.