The appearance of print in eighteenth-century fiction
By: Christopher Flint
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 282
ISBN-13: 9781107008397
Subjects: Authors and readers; Publishing; Publishers and publishing; History and criticism; Fiction; Books and reading; Appreciation; Printing; LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; English fiction; Authors and publishers; Books; History
Description: "Eighteenth-century fiction holds an unusual place in the history of modern print culture. The novel gained prominence largely because of advances in publishing, but, as a popular genre, it also helped shape those very developments. Authors in the period manipulated the appearance of the page and print technology more deliberately than has been supposed, prompting new forms of reception among readers. Christopher Flint's book explores works by both obscure 'scribblers' and canonical figures, such as Swift, Haywood, Defoe, Richardson, Sterne and Austen, that interrogated the complex interactions between the book's material aspects and its producers and consumers. Flint links historical shifts in how authors addressed their profession to how books were manufactured and how readers consumed texts. He argues that writers exploited typographic media to augment other crucial developments in prose fiction, from formal realism and free indirect discourse to accounts of how 'the novel' defined itself as a genre"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Part I. Author, Book, Reader: 1. Preface: prose fiction and print culture in eighteenth-century Britain; 2. Pre-scripts: the contexts of literary production; 3. Post scripts: the fate of the page in Charles Gildon's epistolary fiction; Part II. Reader, Book, Author: 4. In other words: printers' ornaments and the substitutions of text; 5. Inanimate fiction: circulating stories in object narratives; 6. Only a female pen: women writers and fictions of the page; 7. After words; Notes; Bibliography; Index.