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

“By taking a close look at materials no previous twentieth-century critic has seriously investigated in literary terms—ephemeral journalism, moralistic tracts, questions-and-answer columns, ‘wonder’ narratives—Paul Hunter discovers a tangled set of roots for the early novel. His provocative argument for a new historicized understanding of the genre and its early readers brilliantly reveals unexpected affinities.” —Patricia Meyer Spacks, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, University of Virginia

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.