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18th century british culture
18th century british literature
A01=William Beatty Warner
aphra behn
Author_William Beatty Warner
british novel
Category=DS
Category=DSBD
Category=DSK
Category=JBCC
consumer culture
consumerism
cultural studies
daniel defoe
delarivier manley
early british novels
eliza haywood
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
genre of the novel
henry fielding
joseph andrews
literary
love in excess
love letters
male authorship
morally respectable
national character
new atalantis
novel as entertainment
novel as literary
novel reading
novels
pamela
popular narratives
print media
realism
roxana
samuel richardson
Product details
- ISBN 9780520212961
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 Sep 1998
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Novels have been a respectable component of culture for so long that it is difficult for twentieth-century observers to grasp the unease produced by novel reading in the eighteenth century. William Warner shows how the earliest novels in Britain, published in small-format print media, provoked early instances of the modern anxiety about the effects of new media on consumers. Warner uncovers a buried and neglected history of the way in which the idea of the novel was shaped in response to a newly vigorous market in popular narratives. In order to rein in the sexy and egotistical novel of amorous intrigue, novelists and critics redefined the novel as morally respectable, largely masculine in authorship, national in character, realistic in its claims, and finally, literary. Warner considers early novelists in their role as entertainers and media workers, and shows how the short, erotic, plot-driven novels written by Behn, Manley, and Haywood came to be absorbed and overwritten by the popular novels of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding.
Considering these novels as entertainment as well as literature, Warner traces a different story - one that redefines the terms within which the British novel is to be understood and replaces the literary history of the rise of the novel with a more inclusive cultural history.
William B. Warner is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Chance and the Text of Experience: Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (1986) and coeditor with Deidre Lynch of Cultural Institutions of the Novel (1996).
