Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-century English Fiction

Front Cover
W. W. Norton & Company, 1990 - 421 pages
"By taking a close look at materials no previous twentieth-century critic has seriously investigated in literary terms--ephemeral journalism, moralistic tracts, questions-and-answer columns, 'wonder' narratives--Paul Hunter discovers a tangled set of roots for the early novel. His provocative argument for a new historicized understanding of the genre and its early readers brilliantly reveals unexpected affinities." --Patricia Meyer Spacks, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, University of Virginia

From inside the book

Contents

What Was New About the Novel?
3
The Critical Tyranny
29
II
39
Readers Reading
61
Time
89
Place
110
A World Well Lost?
138
The Commitment to Contemporaneity
167
Fact Certainty and the Desire for Wonder
195
The Biases of Presentism
225
The Guide Tradition
248
13
255
History Biography
338
Copyright

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About the author (1990)

J. Paul Hunter is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe; Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance; and Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. He is author of the first nine editions of The Norton Introduction to Poetry and the long-time co-editor of The Norton Introduction to Literature and New Worlds of Literature.

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