Skip to Main Content

The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 1: Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750

Online ISBN:
9780191869730
Print ISBN:
9780199580033
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 1: Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750

Thomas Keymer (ed.)
Thomas Keymer
(ed.)
Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts & University Professor of English, University of Toronto
Find on
Published online:
21 June 2018
Published in print:
12 October 2017
Online ISBN:
9780191869730
Print ISBN:
9780199580033
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This volume is the first in a twelve-volume series presenting a comprehensive history of English-language prose fiction. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the ‘literary’ novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and tendencies. This volume explores the long period between the origins of printing in late fifteenth-century England and the establishment of the novel as a recognized, reputable genre in the mid eighteenth century. Later chapters in the book provide original, authoritative accounts of innovations by the major canonical authors, notably Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, who have traditionally been seen as pioneering ‘the rise of the novel’, in Ian Watt’s famous phrase. With its extended chronological and geographical range, however, the book also contextualizes these eighteenth-century developments in revelatory new ways, to provide a fresh, bold, and comprehensive account of the richness and variety of fictional traditions as they developed over two and a half centuries. Attention is focused on areas often neglected or excluded in traditional ‘rise of the novel’ scholarship, including non-realist modes such as romance, the heterogeneous category of Elizabethan fiction, the importance of translation and adaptation from classical, oriental, and continental sources, and the character of the emergent novel as a phenomenon of print culture.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close