Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

3.6/5 ( ratings)

A celebratory history and appreciation of the varied, wildly experimental nature of fiction in eighteenth-century England

In this study intended for general readers, eminent critic Patricia Meyer Spacks provides a fresh, engaging account of the early history of the English novel. Novel Beginnings departs from the traditional, narrow focus on the development of the realistic novel to emphasize the many kinds of experimentation that marked the genre in the eighteenth century before its conventions were firmly established in the nineteenth. Treating well-known works like Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy in conjunction with less familiar texts such as Sarah Fielding’s The Cry and Jane Barker’s A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies , the book evokes the excitement of a multifaceted and unpredictable process of growth and change.

Investigating fiction throughout the 1700s, Spacks delineates the individuality of specific texts while suggesting connections among novels. She sketches a wide range of forms and themes, including Providential narratives, psychological thrillers, romans à clef, sentimental parables, political allegories, Gothic romances, and many others. These multiple narrative experiments show the impossibility of thinking of eighteenth-century fiction simply as a precursor to the nineteenth-century novel, Spacks shows. Instead, the vast variety of engagements with the problems of creating fiction demonstrates that literary history—by no means inexorable—might have taken quite a different course.

Language: English

Pages: 320

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Yale University Press

Release: May 01, 2006

ISBN: 0300110316

ISBN 13: 9780300110319

Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

Patricia Meyer Spacks

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Read Download

Language: English

Pages: 320

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Yale University Press

Release: May 01, 2006

ISBN: 0300110316

ISBN 13: 9780300110319

More books from Patricia Meyer Spacks

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Popular Genres

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

More books from Patricia Meyer Spacks

The Norton Anthology of Western Literature, Volume 1

On Rereading

The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volumes A, B, C: Beginnings to 1650

The Norton Anthology of World Literature: 100 to 1500

Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind

The Female Imagination

Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self

Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels

The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Volume 2

The Norton Anthology of Western Literature, Volume 2

Daedalus 138:1 (Winter 2009) - Reflecting on the Humanities

Reading Eighteenth-Century Poetry

Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination

The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volume A, Beginning to A.D. 100

The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces

Female Imagination

Advocacy in the Classroom: Problems and Possibilities

The Poetry of Vision

Daedalus 143:1 (Winter 2014) - What Humanists Do