{"product_id":"born-yesterday","title":"Born Yesterday","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe early novel was not the coming-of-age story we know today—eighteenth-century adolescent protagonists remained in a constant state of arrested development, never truly maturing.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBetween the emergence of the realist novel in the early eighteenth century and the novel's subsequent alignment with self-improvement a century later lies a significant moment when novelistic characters were unlikely to mature in any meaningful way. That adolescent protagonists poised on the cusp of adulthood resisted a headlong tumble into maturity through the workings of plot reveals a curious literary and philosophical counter-tradition in the history of the novel. Stephanie Insley Hershinow's \u003ci\u003eBorn Yesterday\u003c\/i\u003e shows how the archetype of the early realist novice reveals literary character tout court. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThrough new readings of canonical novels by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, Hershinow severs the too-easy tie between novelistic form and character formation, a conflation, she argues, of \u003ci\u003eBild\u003c\/i\u003e with \u003ci\u003eBildung\u003c\/i\u003e. A pop-culture-infused epilogue illustrates the influence of the eighteenth-century novice, as embodied by Austen's \u003ci\u003eEmma\u003c\/i\u003e, in the 1995 film \u003ci\u003eClueless\u003c\/i\u003e, as well as in dystopian YA works like \u003ci\u003eThe Hunger Games\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDrawing on bold close readings, \u003ci\u003eBorn Yesterday\u003c\/i\u003e alters the landscape of literary historical eighteenth-century studies and challenges some of novel theory's most well-worn assumptions.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Johns Hopkins University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54226498191704,"sku":"9781421429670","price":50.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9781421429670_b7e142fd-859e-4f0c-af59-e6c4823c937a.jpg?v=1771332338","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/born-yesterday","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}