Title: A new species of criticism : eighteenth-century discourse on the novel /
Authors: Bartolomeo, Joseph F., 1958-
Publisher: University of Delaware Press ; Associated University Presses,
Year: 1994
Subjects: English fiction History and criticism Theory, etc.; Criticism Great Britain History
Abstract: The fascinating, complex commentary on the novel genre by its earliest practitioners and critics moves to the foreground in A New Species of Criticism. Exhuming and analyzing a variety of ostensibly peripheral texts - prefaces, dedications, letters, pamphlets, and periodical reviews - Joseph F. Bartolomeo examines the role played by critical discourse in establishing the novel as a potent force in literary and popular culture. He also demonstrates the extent to which early novelists and critics anticipated many of the aesthetic and ethical issues that concern critics of fiction, and of other popular genres, in our time. The first part of this study is devoted primarily to novelists' commentary within and about their texts. Writers before 1740 set the critical agenda by struggling with the relative importance of and the relationships between the sources, means, and ends of novels.^
Contents: Chapter 1. Why, how, and whence novels? Congreve to Defoe --- Chapter 2. Cracking facades of authority: Richardson, Fielding, and Johnson --- Chapter 3. Respect, readers, or both? the later novelists --- Chapter 4. Hierarchies of fiction for a cultural elite: periodical reviewers (I) --- Chapter 5. The balanced critical practices of practical critics: periodical reviewers (II)