Blackwell Reference Online

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The questions scholars ask about texts determine the knowledge they create. In fact, the originating questions are often more important than the answers, for they initiate broader interrogations and ultimately help construct a discipline. The essays in this collection consistently ask provocative and interesting questions that challenge, revise, or resist previous inquiries into the eighteenth-century novel. In doing so, the essays – both singly and collectively – contribute to and potentially revise our understanding of that genre as it has been constructed in the late twentieth century. The publisher's charge for this volume was for essays that were theoretically informed, academically rigorous, and anticipating (or establishing) new directions in the field. These essays strive to do just that, creating a dialogue that potentially advances the way we think about the novel and, perhaps, eighteenth-century studies generally.The essays upend some of the traditionally held “truths” about the novel that students and scholars have all too often used as a kind of critical shorthand, and they foreground information that qualifies previous interpretations of “novel culture.” The novel was not the most popular genre of the period – “the novel” was not even a recognized or codified genre until well after mid-century (and, arguably, later). It is a generic marker that is, at best, provisional. ... log in or subscribe to read full text