The contemporaneous development of speculative investment and the novel in the early eighteenth century, and women's role in both.

Essays by leading scholars provide a comprehensive overview of women writers and their work in Restoration and eighteenth-century Britain.

A Companion to the Eighteenth-century Novel furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral contexts. An up-to-date resource for the study of the eighteenth-century novel Furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral context Foregrounds those topics of most historical and political relevance to the twenty-first century Explores formative influences on the eighteenth-century novel, its engagement with the major issues and philosophies of the period, and its lasting legacy Covers both traditional themes, such as narrative authority and print culture, and cutting-edge topics, such as globalization, nationhood, technology, and science Considers both canonical and non-canonical literature

This book analyzes the relation between print cultures and eighteenth-century literary and political practices and, identifying Queen Anne's England as a crucial moment in the public life of gossip, offers readings of key texts that demonstrate how gossip's interpretative strategies shaped readers' participation in the literary and public spheres.

This study looks at developments in eighteenth-century drama that influenced the rise of the novel; it begins by asking why women writers of this period experimented so frequently with both novels and plays. Here, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen explore theatrical frames--from the playhouse, to the social conventions of masquerade, to the fictional frame of the novel itself—that encourage audiences to dismiss what they contain as feigned. Yet such frames also, as a result, create a safe space for self-expression. These authors explore such payoffs both within their work—through descriptions of heroines who disguise themselves to express themselves—and through it. Reading the act of authorship as itself a form of performance, Anderson contextualizes the convention of fictionality that accompanied the development of the novel; she notes that as the novel, like the theater of the earlier eighteenth century, came to highlight its fabricated nature, authors could use it as a covert yet cathartic space. Fiction for these authors, like theatrical performance for the actor, thus functions as an act of both disclosure and disguise—or finally presents self-expression as the ability to oscillate between the two, in "the play of fiction."

These essays explore the remarkable expansion of publishing from 1750 to 1850 which reflected the growth of literacy, and the diversification of the reading public. Experimentation with new genres, methods of advertising, marketing and dissemination, forms of critical reception and modes of access to writing are also examined in detail. This collection represents a new wave of critical writing extending cultural materialism beyond its accustomed concern with historicizing the words on the page into the economics of literature, and the investigation of neglected areas of print culture.

He also shows the different currents at work, belying any simple picture of England and the English as confident and self-assured."--BOOK JACKET.