The Eighteenth-Century Novel

A selective list of online articles and books on the eighteenth-century novel, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the MLA Guidelines for Authors of Web Pages.

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Literary Criticism

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford Univ. Press, 1987). At the publisher's web site. At Google Books

Beasley, Jerry C. "Little by little; or, the history of the early novel, now." Studies in the Novel, 22-JUN-98

Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987). At the publisher's web site. At Google Books

Bender, John. Enlightenment Fiction and the Scientific Hypothesis. "In this essay, I view the eighteenth-century novel as part of a cultural system that worked to validate Enlightenment canons of knowledge by dynamically linking the realms of science and fiction in the very process of setting them in opposition." Representations Vol. 60 (Winter 1997), pp1-23

Bond, Clinton. "Representing Reality: Strategies of Realism in the Early English Novel." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6:2 (January 1994)

Brown, Bill. "Novel Objects: Object Relations in an Expanded Field." An audio recording of this lecture, the Ian Watt Lecture for 2006 at Stanford University's Center for the Study of the Novel, is available through this web site

Castle, Terry. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford Univ. Press, 1986) Publisher's web site. At Google Books

Corman, Brian. Should McKeon Replace Watt? A review of Michael McKeon's The Origins of the English Novel, 1600--1740 in Univ. of Toronto Quarterly, 58, 4 (Summer 1989) (removed)

Davis, Lennard. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Columbia Univ. Press, 1983). At the publisher's web site At Google Books

Dickie, Simon. The mid-century "ramble" novels On the "mass of comic or semi-comic 'lives,' 'histories,' 'rambles' and 'adventures'" consumed by the English reading public in the mid-eighteenth century. Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel, Dissertation of the Month: February 2001, Chapter 8

Doody, Margaret. "Nasty Characters and Unlovable Styles: The Novel's Negative Way to Pleasure." An audio recording of this lecture, the Ian Watt Lecture for 2007 at Stanford University's Center for the Study of the Novel, is available through this web site

Downie, J.A. "The Making of the English Novel." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9:3 (April 1997)

Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Univ. of California Press, 1994). Publisher's web site. At Google Books

Gilman, Priscilla. On three recent re-publications by the Anglo-Irish author Mary Davys (1674–1732). The reviewer notes that "renewed attention to the work of Restoration and 18th Century women writers over the past decade has resulted in a major revision to our sense of the history and development of the novel. Until fairly recently, courses on and histories of the novel began with Defoe or Richardson, and criticism of the 18th Century novel focused on the work of the canonical male novelists. With their series 'Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women,' the University Press of Kentucky has been instrumental in the processes both of recovering female voices and of re-opening the question 'Where and how does the novel rise?'"

Hammond, Brean S. "Mid-Century English Quixotism and the Defence of the Novel," in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10:3 (April 1998)

Hunter, J. Paul. "Robert Boyle and the Epistemology of the Novel," in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2:4 (July 1990)

Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (Norton, 1990). First page of review only. Reviewed by Margaret Anne Doody in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Nov., 1992), pp. 123-126. At Google Books

Leuschner, Eric. Anthologizing the Novel. Summarizes various critical approaches to the novel over the past 100 years and reviews Michael McKeon's Theory of the Novel: An Historical Approach. Minnesota Review (2002) (removed)

Mayer, Robert. A review of Mayer's History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997). First page of article only. Reviewed by Douglas Lane Patey in Modern Philology, Vol. 98, No. 1 (Aug., 2000), pp. 73-75

Mayer, Robert. "History, Humphry Clinker, and the Novel," in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 4:3 (April 1992)

McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Johns Hopkins, 1987). "Essential reading...Challenging prevailing theories that tie the origins of the novel to the ascendancy of "realism" and the "middle class," McKeon argues that this new genre arose in response to the profound instability of literary and social categories." Publisher's web site. At Google Books

Novak, Maximillian E. "Warfare and Its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Or, Why Eighteenth-Century Fiction Failed to Produce a War and Peace," in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 4:3 (April 1992)

Price, Leah. A review of The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge UP, 2000), Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2003. Review by Reitz, Caroline

Ray, William. "Rethinking Reading: The Novel and Cultural Stratification." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10:2 (January 1998)

Richetti, John J. The English Novel in History 1700-1780 (Routledge, 1999). Covers Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Daniel Defoe, Fanny Burney and Laurence Sterne, along with lesser known figures, women novelists and women's amatory fiction, including Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood. Publisher's web site. At Google Books

Richetti, John J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). At the publisher's web site. At Google Books

Richetti, John J., John Bender, Diedre David and Michael Seidel. A review of The Columbia History of the Novel (Columbia Univ. Press, 1994). "The History of the Novel Writ Large---and New." Reviewed by Jerry C. Beasley, in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8:1 (October 1995)

Rivero, Albert J. and George Justice, eds. The Eighteenth Century Novel. Publisher's web site

Sabor, Peter. "Harold Bloom on Eighteenth-Century Fiction." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3:2 (January 1991)

Thompson, J. "Rewriting the rise of the novel," a review of Clifford Siskin's The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830 and William B. Warner's Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750 (Univ. of California Press, 1998), in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 1999

Tennenhouse, Leonard. "Libertine America." On American novel reading and seduction plots in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (Volume 11, Number 3)

Warner, William B. "Social Power and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Foucault and Transparent Literary History," in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3:3 (April 1991)

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Univ. of California, 1957). "The classic description of the interworkings of social conditions, changing attitudes, and literary practices during the period when the novel emerged as the dominant literary form of the individualist era." Covers Moll Flanders, Tom Jones, Robinson Crusoe, individualism, Daniel Defoe, picaresque novel, Pamela and marriage, courtly love, romantic love, the epistolary novel, and Clarissa. New edition, at the publisher's web site. At Google Books

Web sites and bibliographies

The Center for the Study of the Novel at Stanford University publishes several "dissertations of the month" and a few articles on their web site, on highly specialized subjects, along with a calendar of events

Eighteenth-Century Fiction. An international quarterly devoted to the critical and historical investigation of imaginative prose of the period 1660-1832. Full text of articles in volumes 1-10, from 1989-1998, available online.

"Account of Rise of the Novel." Annotated bibliography of studies on the eighteenth century novel, beginning with Ian Watt's 1957 study and listing responses to Watt, from Professor Laura Mandell

Primary and secondary reading list for The Rise of the Novel, by Dr. David Richter, CUNY

18th-Century Novelists

Burney, Fanny (1752-1840)

Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731)

Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761)

Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

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