Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction

An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction deals with fiction of the 'long eighteenth century', using a clearly defined pool of texts and corpus of writers. The first part of the study discusses the broader issues of definitions and approaches, genre and gender, and canon formation; the second part, after a more general discussion of Richardson and Fielding, offers a series of five paired readings, juxtaposing texts by Behn and Defoe, Sterne and Smollett, Lennox and Burney, Radcliffe and Godwin and Austen.