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London and the Making of Provincial Literature
In the early nineteenth century, London publishers dominated the transatlantic book trade. No one felt this more keenly than authors from Ireland, Scotland, and the United States who struggled to establish their own national literary traditions while publishing in the English metropolis. Authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper devised a range of strategies to transcend the national rivalries of the literary field. By writing prefaces and footnotes addressed to a foreign audience, revising texts specifically for London markets, and celebrating national particularity, provincial authors appealed to English readers with idealistic stories of cross-cultural communion. From within the messy and uneven marketplace for books, Joseph Rezek argues, provincial authors sought to exalt and purify literary exchange. In so doing, they helped shape the Romantic-era belief that literature inhabits an autonomous sphere in society.
London and the Making of Provincial Literaturetells an ambitious story about the mutual entanglement of the history of books and the history of aesthetics in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Situated between local literary scenes and a distant cultural capital, enterprising provincial authors and publishers worked to maximize success in London and to burnish their reputations and build their industry at home. Examining the production of books and the circulation of material texts between London and the provincial centers of Dublin, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia, Rezek claims that the publishing vortex of London inspired a dynamic array of economic and aesthetic practices that shaped an era in literary history.
eBook
Before Fiction
Fiction has become nearly synonymous with literature itself, as if Homer and Dante and Pynchon were all engaged in the same basic activity. But one difficulty with this view is simply that a literature trafficking in openly invented characters is a quite recent development. Novelists before the nineteenth century ceaselessly asserted that their novels were true stories, and before that, poets routinely took their basic plots and heroes from the past. We have grown accustomed to thinking of the history of literature and the novel as a progression from the ideal to the real. Yet paradoxically, the modern triumph of realism is also the triumph of a literature that has shed all pretense to literalness.Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Noveloffers a new understanding of the early history of the genre in England and France, one in which writers were not slowly discovering a type of fictionality we now take for granted but rather following a distinct set of practices and rationales. Nicholas D. Paige reinterprets Lafayette'sLa Princesse de Clèves, Rousseau'sJulie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, Diderot'sLa Religieuse, and other French texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in light of the period's preoccupation with literal truth. Paige argues that novels like these occupied a place before fiction, a pseudofactual realm that in no way leads to modern realism. The book provides an alternate way of looking at a familiar history, and in its very idiom and methodology charts a new course for how we should study the novel and think about the evolution of cultural forms.
eBook
The Oxford history of the novel in English
\"The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a 12-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large, international team of scholars. 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\"--publisher.
Book
Scottish Women's Gothic and Fantastic Writing
This book provides a critical survey of the gothic texts of late twentieth-century and contemporary Scottish women writers including Kate Atkinson, Ellen Galford, A.L. Kennedy, Ali Smith and Emma Tennant focusing on four themes: quests and other worlds, witches, doubles and ghosts.
eBook
Limited Access
A recurrent trope in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British
fiction compares reading to traveling and asserts that the
pleasures of novel-reading are similar to the joys of a carriage
journey. Kyoko Takanashi points to how these narratives also,
however, draw attention to the limits of access often experienced
in travel, and she demonstrates the ways in which the realist
novel, too, is marked by issues of access both symbolic and
material.
Limited Access draws on media studies and the history
of books and reading to bring to life a history of realism
concerned with the inclusivity of readers. Examining works by Henry
Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, William
Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot, Takanashi shows how
novelists employed metaphors of transport to constantly reassess
what readers could and could not access. She gives serious
attention to marginalized readers figured within the text,
highlighting their importance and how writers were concerned about
the \"limited access\" of readers to their novels. Discussions of
transport allowed novelists to think about mediation, and, as this
study shows, these concerns about access became part of the rise of
the novel and the history of realism in a way that literary history
has not yet recognized.
eBook