Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

What did people read before there were novels? Not necessarily just other "literary" works, according to this fascinating study of the beginnings of the English novel. To understand the origins of the novel as a species and to read individual novels well, we must know several pasts and traditions--even non-fictional and non-narrative traditions, even non-"artistic" and non-written pasts--that at first might seem far removed from the pleasures readers find in modern novels.

Author: J. Paul Hunter
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 08/01/1994
Pages: 448
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.37lbs
Size: 9.17h x 6.03w x 1.15d
ISBN: 9780393308617

About the Author
Hunter, J. Paul: - J. Paul Hunter is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe; Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance; and Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. He is author of the first nine editions of The Norton Introduction to Poetry and the long-time co-editor of The Norton Introduction to Literature and New Worlds of Literature.