Eighteenth-Century Novel

Abstract

The “18th-century novel” used to refer to works primarily by Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne, but it has long since expanded to include notable women writers such as Burney, Sarah Fielding, Haywood, Lennox, and Manley. The 18th-century novel also encompasses a broad range of subgenres, such as the picaresque, memoir fiction, the epistolary novel, autobiography, criminal narratives, and it-narratives. Whereas older studies of the novel often took a teleological approach, looking for specific places of origin (often posed as a binary choice between realism or romance), more recent studies happily accept its hybrid nature as a form that refashions materials from a variety of other places and traditions. Since the 1970s and the rise of theory, the 18th-century novel has provoked debate about a whole range of subjects to do with the novel as genre, including (though not limited to) gender, disability, race, politics, book history, and media cultures. Recent studies have often emphasized the untidiness of its literary boundaries and analyzed the devices of character, plot, setting, etc., as developed in this fiction, alongside the fictional strategies of other forms of contemporary entertainment, such as dramatic writing. Another emerging trend is revisionist: The reframing of Anglocentric stories of the novel to take account of its transnational, transatlantic, and global connections. Whole bibliographies could be written, and indeed do exist, to guide those interested in the novel of sensibility, the domestic novel, the Gothic novel, and so on. Due to space limitations, this bibliography is necessarily highly selective and does not include works primarily on one single author or exclusively on one dominant trend, mode, or genre (most notably, the Gothic or sentimental novel). It confines itself to British and Irish fiction and does not include scholarship on the American novel during the period, though it does point toward new(ish) interest in the global eighteenth century. This bibliography also does not cover translation or classical reception. It mostly gives space to studies that broadly range from the early eighteenth century to the 1780s and which cover the novel’s development in general and not particular writers (unless otherwise stated and justified). Though it includes a few seminal works that document what has now come to be known as “the rise of the novel,” scholars and students who are interested in that history of criticism should look at Nick Seager’s excellent Oxford Bibliographies article “The Rise of the Novel in Britain, 1660–1780” (as well as Seager 2012, cited under General Overviews), and Tom Keymer’s section on this in his article “Samuel Richardson.” In addition, other bibliographies relevant to this field currently available in the Oxford Bibliographies series include: “The Epistolary Novel,” “Letters and Letter Writing,” “Daniel Defoe,” “Henry Fielding,” and “Laurence Sterne.”