1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
Summary
Since the 1980s analysts of the eighteenth-century novel have sought to locate the emergence of the genre in the context of contemporary fictional expectations and concepts of literary form. Writers such as Lennard Davis, Michael McKeon, William Ray and J. Paul Hunter have developed the work of John Richetti in the late 1960s, which examined the relationship between the novel and forms of popular fiction, and have made a concerted effort to reverse the teleological bias that has characterised much criticism since the publication of Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel in 1957. As Richetti wrote in Popular Fiction Before Richardson:
The beginnings of the novel must be approached as essentially an event in the development of mass culture, a social phenomenon with important consequences for literature proper. What is required is not a critical hunt for lost minor masterpieces… but an effort of the historical imagination to understand the values which the eighteenth-century reading public attached to fiction, or, at least the values which the most successful popular narratives advertised and delivered.
J. Paul Hunter has argued along similar lines that:
To understand the origins of the novel as a species and to read individual novels well, we must know several pasts and traditions – even non-fictional and non-narrative traditions, even non-‘artistic’ and non-written pasts – that at first might seem far removed from the pleasures readers find in modern novels … All texts – at least all texts that find or create readers – construct a field in which desires and provisions compete, and the history of texts … involves a continuous sorting out of needs, demands, insistences and outcomes.
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- Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel , pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998