Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In any period after ‘the rise of the novel’ there is more fiction than one can read and more, probably, than anyone will ever count. Historically, the sample becomes unmanageable by the usual machineries of critical description in the period 1780 to 1830 when, it is estimated, the population of England doubled from 7 million to 14 million and adult readers as a group quintupled from 1.5 million to over 7 million. Up to three-quarters of working-class British adults were in some sense ‘literate’ by 1830 and were catered for by a well-developed and complex fiction industry producing a diverse range of wares from the very sophisticated to the monotonously crude.Various strategies for making sense of fiction of the Romantic period may be devised. One can examine productive, distributive and reception systems-going behind the novels to the material apparatus that makes them. One can compile chronological checklists. One can identify a manageably small canon of texts, and analyse them as the best (and arguably typical) examples of the whole-this is the method favoured in most educational programmes. Or one can offer a typology of the fiction in terms of its major ‘genres’ or styles-which is what I propose to do here. I have mapped out the major genres along four main stems: Gothic Fiction, Romantic Fiction, Domestic Fiction, National Tales. Branching off are a variety of sub-genres. Any ... log in or subscribe to read full text