It is not easy to write a new theory of the rise of the novel. Almost every aspect of eighteenth-century society, it can seem, has been scrutinized for its connection to the genre of Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen. Individualism and Protestantism, nationalism and imperialism, capitalism and sexual politics, at one time or another have all been proposed as the novel's basic catalyst. Although today a general ecumenicalism prevails, scholars still occasionally add another factor to the list, arguing for the impact of one neglected variable or another. In his ambitious and wide-ranging new study, Jordan Alexander Stein enters this crowded field. More than that, he seeks to reconfigure it: When Novels Were Books is at once contribution to the historiography of the rise of the novel and a challenge to the enterprise as a whole.The argument, which is set forth with admirable clarity, has two parts. First, Stein argues that novels weren't actually distinct from other kinds of books, specifically from religious books, until the end of the eighteenth century. In the preceding period, they were “available in the same bookshops and libraries, on the same tables and shelves, printed in equivalent size formats with similar lengths, and sold for comparable prices” (125). Secularization happened, but not until decades after Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Richardson had published their landmark works. Second, Stein argues that when the novel at last came to be seen as inhabiting a separate terrain from religious books, it was because of a fundamental change in the structure of religious publishing, which had the effect of removing it from the print marketplace. Only in this new, secularized publishing sphere could novels finally come to be seen as a fully distinct form, severing their longstanding connection to religious literature.For much of the book, then, Stein's theory is not a theory of the rise of the novel, for there is no novel to rise. Rather it is an attempt to question the “rise of the novel” thesis—in any of its heterogeneous forms—by describing how prose fiction, the genre we would later come to identify with the novel, took on many of its most notable features without being understood as particularly distinctive or unique. As he puts it, the study is an attempt to reframe the “rise of the novel” “as ironic rather than progressive” (19). Only in the final chapter and conclusion does Stein propose an underlying cause driving the origin, or, better, the differentiation, of the novel, located in the material history of the book and the structure of publishing. As the title suggests, When Novels Were Books is a work of book history; it is also an attempt to revise the story of the novel's origins, shifting its periodization half a century forward in time and reassessing its significance.In order to make this case, Stein devotes the first two chapters to an argument about the emergence of one key feature of the novel, its method of representing character. Beginning, rather surprisingly, with Augustine's Confessions, he traces the emergence of an Anglo-Protestant understanding of character on both sides of the Atlantic, from the public confessions of Puritan congregations in colonial New England to influential English devotional writers such as William Perkins to the fictions of John Bunyan and Defoe. What these representations of character shared, he argues, was a tendency to “figure character negatively, in terms of their vulnerability and weakness before more powerful forces” (53). In practice, this description of character encompasses the Puritan emphasis on human sin and wretchedness, as well as the more mundane forms of helplessness, danger, and risk that define adventure or seduction plots.In the eighteenth century, Stein continues in his third chapter, this “negative” conception of character proved important to the history of publishing. Drawing on an impressive range of materials, again from a transatlantic perspective, Stein shows that character played a special role in the commercial sphere. It was the node that held together what he refers to as “text-networks”: the mass of abridgements, selections, continuations, and parodies that grew around works such as Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, or Jonathan Edwards's Life of David Brainerd, making them culturally omnipresent and turning them into commercial sensations. Here, again, Stein focuses on how character bridged works of fiction and devotional literature, revealing the common textual culture and print marketplace both inhabited. When Novels Were Books is thus, among other things, a contribution to the increasingly lively subfield of studies of literary character. When Alex Woloch published his study of character in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, he could still refer to character as a neglected area of research in comparison to, say, plot or style. Today, that is no longer the case; the role character plays in the commercial success or popular appeal of literature has become a particularly exciting area of inquiry. (Deidre Lynch, one of the more influential scholars in this subfield, has blurbed the book.)If the novel and devotional literature shared a common market, textual form, and conception of character for the majority of the eighteenth century, Stein argues that the two separated in the 1790s. His fourth and final chapter offers a theory of their split. By the end of the eighteenth century, Stein suggests, a significant proportion of devotional works were published by religious societies and given away for free, rather than sold on the book market. At the same time, the rise of circulating libraries introduced an important new avenue for the dissemination of novels. The consequence was a new “bifurcation in the conditions under which novels and books of piety were being printed” (139), which ultimately led to the differentiation of the two. In his conclusion, Stein considers the effects of the novel's accidental secularization, as well as the history of its misinterpretation.* * *“For better or for worse,” Stein states in his introduction, “the four central chapters of this study are not independent essays, and each does not readily stand on its own” (12). This is a modest way of putting it. I might instead say that When Novels Were Books advances a unified interpretation of the rise of the novel—the argument of the book, to its credit, is more than the sum of its parts. What this means is that, ultimately, it has to be evaluated on the strength and coherence of its basic account. Readers will find stimulating propositions and a great deal of interesting research in each of the chapters. But the question remains: does Stein's account of the rise of the novel actually work?Stein's analysis conjoins two approaches. The first, of course, is book and publishing history. The second is a religious interpretation of the novel's origins. Needless to say, both these approaches have attracted a vast historiography. In particular, the relationship between the novel's depictions of interiority and Protestant traditions of self-examination, including the Puritan use of such genres as autobiography and diary-keeping, has long been an important strand of research on the history of the novel. Stein's analysis draws on and adds to each of these scholarly traditions. It is by combining them, however, that he seeks to arrive at a distinctive theory of the rise of the English novel. But it is not clear to me that the two approaches, as they appear in When Novels Were Books, genuinely align. Although there are many interesting points of intersection between the two, there is also, from the perspective of the argument as a whole, a certain conceptual tension dividing them.A complete history of the emergence of the novel in its capacity as a material object, as a book, would of course encompass much more than its relation to religious publishing. It is certainly true, as Stein points out, that considered purely in terms of the material form of the book, little distinguished early works of prose fiction from popular devotional works. Neither were, as a rule, lavish folios or flimsy broadsides. Many of the same printers printed both, and many of the same readers read them. Although there were a growing number of specialist publishers, many still had lists that spanned religious works and those books we now class as early novels. But the same could, of course, be said of most of the genres that inhabited the world of print beyond devotional works, including such ubiquitous forms as instructional manuals and conduct guides. As Stein is well aware, most of the classes of books that have been proposed as influences on the English novel in fact fall into this category, including many French and Spanish fictions in translation, criminal autobiographies, popular prose romances, jest books, and some histories. It could perhaps be argued that, because of their enduring popularity, religious works held an especially significant place in the print marketplace; but they were by no means the only books with which readers browsing seventeenth- or eighteenth-century bookstalls would have associated early novels or the novel's precursors.Assimilating the publishing history of the novel to the publishing history of devotional works thus cuts off the novel from much of its contemporary print context—from, among other things, the history of fiction, which plays little role in Stein's account. It also understates the extent to which fictions and religious works could be seen as positively opposed, even before the moment of division he locates in the 1790s. Pilgrim's Progress, it is true, inhabits both categories. But it is difficult to imagine the minister who would have publicly endorsed Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister. Yet this salacious work of late seventeenth-century epistolary fiction is surely not less relevant than the works of William Perkins to the genesis of Pamela.Conversely, the influence of English Protestantism on the rise of the novel cannot be simply, or even primarily, studied through the history of the printed book, as Stein's own argument demonstrates. In tracing the emergence of a distinctive conception of character, Stein moves across media, beginning not with print history but with Augustine, and taking oral testimony and notebook records into account. Particularly in the first and second chapters of the study, character appears primarily to be a formal and cultural element of literature, which, if anything, shapes the production and reception of the material book, rather than vice versa. Stein initially finds the most salient point of connection between devotional works and prose fictions, then, in their common literary techniques, not their place within the publishing industry or the history of the codex. Chapters 3 and 4 do make a compelling case for seeing the relationship between the rise of the novel and religious writing in terms of their place within (or, in the final chapter, outside of) the print marketplace. Yet the first half of the book suggests that this is only one aspect—if a fascinating one—of the relationship between devotional and fictional writing.Still, in attempting to draw together disparate threads in the historiography of the rise of the novel, When Novels Were Books illustrates just how capacious research in this field has been and how exciting it remains. Touching on the mutual entanglements of English Protestantism and literature, the history of the book trade in its many dimensions, the long and complicated metamorphoses of literary character, and the dissemination of literature across the Atlantic world, Stein shows that there remain vital connections to discover and neglected sources to explore in the story of the novel's origins.