The Oxford History of the Novel in English

Volume 1: Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750

Edited by Thomas Keymer

Oxford History of the Novel in English

A major reference work that brings together leading international specialists to explore the origins of printing in late fifteenth-century England, to the rise of the novel in the mid eighteenth century
Includes extensive coverage of European traditions of fiction and their influence on writers in English, with chapters on major writers such as Rabelais and Cervantes, and on genres including the ancient novel, chivalric romance, and Spanish rogue fiction
Relates the emergent novel to numerous other genres and modes such as voyage narrative, life writing, religious allegory, and journalism, and to the material contexts of authorship, publishing, and reading practices
Situates canonical writers and works from Nashe and Sidney, to Richardson and Fielding against the background of hundreds of lesser known or entirely forgotten works of the extended period
Unique feature of four 'cross-sections' chapters undertaking exhaustive surveys of the varieties of fiction produced in specimen five-year periods

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

Volume 1: Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750

Edited by Thomas Keymer

Oxford History of the Novel in English

Description

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.

Volume 1 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 volume 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 volume 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.

The volume thus establishes a newly comprehensive mapping of early fiction that rectifies the shortcomings and exclusions of established 'rise of the novel' scholarship. These include the relative neglect of the importance of women writers, following Behn's reinvention of romance in the 1680s, in shaping novelistic themes and techniques; a restrictive generic definition based on circumstantial and psychological realism to the exclusion of non-realist modes that flourished for centuries beforehand; a teleological bias that overlooks or downgrades phases and types of fiction production, such as the richly variegated category of Elizabethan fiction, that resist being assimilated into narratives of evolution or ascent; a reductive Anglocentrism that leaves out of account the translation, reception, and pervasive influence from the sixteenth century onwards of, among much else, the 'ancient novel' of Apuleius and Heliodorus; Byzantine, Arabian, and Eastern traditions; the Italian novella from Boccaccio to Bandello; Spanish picaresque and anti-romance; and a range of French narrative modes from Rabelais to Marivaux. Alongside these key contexts, the volume treats the emergent novel as, above all, a phenomenon of print culture, with close attention to conditions of authorship, publishing, and reading across the extended period.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

Volume 1: Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750

Edited by Thomas Keymer

Oxford History of the Novel in English

General Editor's Preface
Introduction, Thomas Keymer
Editorial Note
Note on the British Currency before Decimalization
Part 1: Fiction in the Marketplace
1:Authorship, Publication, Reception: 1470-1660, Paul Salzman
2:Authorship, Publication, Reception: 1660-1750, Robert D. Hume
3:Cross-Sections: 1516-1520, Cathy Shrank
4:Cross-Sections: 1596-1600, Lori Humphrey Newcomb
5:Cross-Sections: 1666-1670, James Grantham Turner
6:Cross-Sections: 1716-1720, Pat Rogers
Part 2: Early Modern Fiction - Sources and Modes
7:Fiction and the Origins of Print, Alexandra Gillespie
8:English Fiction and the Ancient Novel, Robert H. F. Carver
9:Chivalric Romance and Novella Collections, Helen Moore
10:Euphuism and Courtly Fiction, Nandini Das
11:Nashe and Satire, Tiffany Stern
12:Elizabethan Popular Romance and the Popular Novel, R. W. Maslen
13:'The conjunction cannot be hurtful'? Sidney's Arcadia and Mingled Genres, Gavin Alexander
14:Utopian Fiction, Daniel Carey
15:Royalist Romance?, Steven N. Zwicker
16:Picaresque and Rogue Fiction, Simon Dickie
17:Cervantes, Anti-Romance, and the Novella, Brean Hammond
18:Rabelaisian Comedy and Satire, Nicholas McDowell
19:Bunyan and Religious Allegory, Michael Davies
Part 3: Restoration Fiction and the Rise of the Novel
20:Formal Experimentation and Theories of Fiction, Nicholas Hudson
21:Non-Fictional Discourses and the Novel, John Richetti
22:Finding Their Accounts: Autobiography, Novel, and the Move from Self 'to you-ward', Stuart Sherman
23:Classical French Fiction and the Restoration Novel, Ros Ballaster
24:Epistolary Fiction, Toni Bowers
25:Pornography and the Novel, Paul Baines
26:Restoration Theatre, and the Novel, Jenny Davidson
27:Exploration, Expansion, and the Early Novel, Cynthia Wall
28:Arabian Nights and Oriental Spies, James Watt
29:The Rise of the Irish Novel, Moyra Haslett
30:Scandal and Amatory Fiction, Jane Spencer
31:Defoe, Journalism, and the Early English Novel: Contexts and Models, J. Paul Hunter
32:Swift, Satire, and the Novel, Claude Rawson
33:The Pamela Debate, Thomas Lockwood
34:Clarissa and Tom Jones, Alan Downie
35:'Moral Romance' and the Novel at Mid-Century, Peter Sabor

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

Volume 1: Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750

Edited by Thomas Keymer

Oxford History of the Novel in English

Author Information

Edited by Thomas Keymer, Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts & University Professor of English, University of Toronto

Thomas Keymer is Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts and University Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He previously taught at St Anne's College, Oxford, where he remains a Supernumerary Fellow. He also serves as General Editor of The Review of English Studies and co-General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson. His most recent books include The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (2009), the Oxford World's Classics edition of William Beckford's Vathek (2013) and Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820, forthcoming in OUP's Clarendon Lectures in English series.

Contributors:

Gavin Alexander, Christ's College, Cambridge
Paul Baines, University of Liverpool
Ros Ballaster, Mansfield College, Oxford
Toni Bowers, University of Pennsylvania
Daniel Carey, National University of Ireland, Galway
Robert H. F. Carver, Durham University
Nandini Das, University of Liverpool
Jenny Davidson, Columbia University
Michael Davies, University of Liverpool
Simon Dickie, University of Toronto
Alan Downie, Goldsmiths, University of London
Alexandra Gillespie, University of Toronto
Brean Hammond, University of Nottingham
Moyra Haslett, Queen's University, Belfast
Nicholas Hudson, University of British Columbia
Robert D. Hume, Pennsylvania State University
J. Paul Hunter, University of Virginia
Thomas Keymer, University of Toronto
Thomas Lockwood, University of Washington
Nicholas McDowell, University of Exeter
R. W. Maslen, University of Glasgow
Helen Moore, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Lori Humphrey Newcomb, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
Claude Rawson, Yale University
John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania
Peter Sabor, McGill University
Paul Salzman, La Trobe University
Stuart Sherman, Fordham University
Cathy Shrank, University of Sheffield
Jane Spencer, University of Exeter
Tiffany Stern, Royal Holloway, University of London
James Grantham Turner, University of California, Berkeley
Cynthia Wall, University of Virginia
James Watt, University of York
Steven N. Zwicker, Washington University, St Louis

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

Volume 1: Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750

Edited by Thomas Keymer

Oxford History of the Novel in English

Reviews and Awards

"By tracing the early beginnings of "the novel" within an age of "prose fiction," Keymer and his authors make strides to place what is "the novel" within a larger, malleable framework of writing styles, one that can be adapted to the pressures of new media." - Joshua J. McEvilla, University of Toronto, Renaissance and Reformation

"This first volume in the set is particularly important for current scholars because earlier theories regarding what constitutes the first "modern novel" have been questioned, and demand additional research ... It is a relief that an Oxford textbook is responding to scholarly concerns ahead of many other literary critics." - Anna Faktorovich, Pennsylvania Literary Journal

"This collection is essential reading for any scholar of prose fiction before 1750. It will be much cited in future studies." - Mary Ellen Lamb, Southern Illinois University, Renaissance Quarterly

"An inclusive and judicious account of British fiction before 1750. ... Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." - A. W. Lee, CHOICE