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  1. Home
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  3. History and the Early English Novel
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
October 2009
Print publication year:
1997
Online ISBN:
9780511582066
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582066
Subjects:
Literature, British History after 1450, History, English Literature 1700-1830, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought (33)
Information

Book description

This new study of the origins of the English novel argues that the novel emerged from historical writing. Examining historical writers and forms frequently neglected by earlier scholars, Robert Mayer shows that in the seventeenth century historical discourse embraced not only 'history' in its modern sense, but also fiction, polemic, gossip, and marvels. Mayer thus explains why Defoe's narratives were initially read as history. It is the acceptance of the claims to historicity, the study argues, that differentiates Defoe's fictions from those of writers like Thomas Deloney and Aphra Behn, important writers who nevertheless have figured less prominently than Defoe in discussions of the novel. Mayer ends by exploring the theoretical implications of the history-fiction connection. His study makes an important contribution to the continuing debate about the emergence of what we now call the novel in Britain in the eighteenth century.

Reviews

'His study makes an important contribution to the continuing debate about the emergence of what we now call the novel in Britain in the eighteenth century.'

Source: http://www.readysteadybook.com/blog.aspx

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