Novel beginnings
Subtitle: experiments in eighteenth-century English fiction
By: Patricia Meyer Spacks.
Series: Yale guides to English literature
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: New Haven, Conn
Language: eng
Number of pages: 309
ISBN-13: 9780300110319
Subjects: English fiction -- 18th century -- History and criticism.; Experimental fiction, English -- History and criticism.; Literary form -- History -- 18th century.
Description: "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 (a kind of hybrid novel and play) and Jane Barker's A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (a novel of adventure replete with sentimental verse and numerous subnarratives), the book evokes the excitement of a multifaceted and unpredictable process of growth and change."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The excitement of beginnings; title: Novels of adventure; title: The novel of development; title: Novels of consciousness; title: The novel of sentiment; title: The novel of manners; title: Gothic fiction; title: The political novel; title: Tristram Shandy and the development of the novel.