The Appearance Of Print In Eighteenth Century Fiction

Eighteenth-century fiction holds an unusual place in the history of modern print culture. The novel gained prominence largely because of advances in publishing, but, as a popular genre, it also helped shape those very developments. Authors in the period manipulated the appearance of the page and print technology more deliberately than has been supposed, prompting new forms of reception among readers. Christopher Flint's book explores works by both obscure 'scribblers' and canonical figures, such as Swift, Haywood, Defoe, Richardson, Sterne and Austen, that interrogated the complex interactions between the book's material aspects and its producers and consumers. Flint links historical shifts in how authors addressed their profession to how books were manufactured and how readers consumed texts. He argues that writers exploited typographic media to augment other crucial developments in prose fiction, from formal realism and free indirect discourse to accounts of how 'the novel' defined itself as a genre.

Explains how new print technologies and the expansion of print culture allowed eighteenth-century writers to develop the novel form.

The uniformity of the eighteenth-century novel in today's paperbacks and critical editions no longer conveys the early novel's visual exuberance. Janine Barchas explains how during the genre's formation in the first half of the eighteenth century, the novel's material embodiment as printed book rivalled its narrative content in diversity and creativity. Innovations in layout, ornamentation, and even punctuation found in, for example, the novels of Richardson, an author who printed his own books, help shape a tradition of early visual ingenuity. From the beginning of the novel's emergence in Britain, prose writers including Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Henry and Sarah Fielding experimented with the novel's appearance. Lavishly illustrated with more than 100 graphic features found in eighteenth-century editions, this important study aims to recover the visual context in which the eighteenth-century novel was produced and read.

The eighteenth century has generally been understood as the Age of Print, when the new medium revolutionized the literary world and rendered manuscript culture obsolete. After Print, however, reveals that the story isn’t so simple. Manuscript remained a vital, effective, and even preferred forum for professional and amateur authors working across fields such as literature, science, politics, religion, and business through the Romantic period. The contributors to this book offer a survey of the manuscript culture of the time, discussing handwritten culinary recipes, the poetry of John Keats, Benjamin Franklin’s letters about his electrical experiments, and more. Collectively, the essays demonstrate that what has often been seen as the amateur, feminine, and aristocratic world of handwritten exchange thrived despite the spread of the printed word. In so doing, they undermine the standard print-manuscript binary and advocate for a critical stance that better understands the important relationship between the media. Bringing together work from literary scholars, librarians, and digital humanists, the diverse essays in After Print offer a new model for archival research, pulling from an exciting variety of fields to demonstrate that manuscript culture did not die out but, rather, may have been revitalized by the advent of printing. Contributors: Leith Davis, Simon Fraser University * Margaret J. M. Ezell, Texas A&M University * Emily C. Friedman, Auburn University * Kathryn R. King, University of Montevallo * Michelle Levy, Simon Fraser University * Marissa Nicosia, Penn State Abington * Philip S. Palmer, Morgan Library and Museum * Colin T. Ramsey, Appalachian State University * Brian Rejack, Illinois State University * Beth Fowkes Tobin, University of Georgia * Andrew O. Winckles, Adrian College

Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen offers an extensive introduction to cinematic representations of the eighteenth century, mostly derived from classic fiction of that period, and sheds light on the process of making prose fiction into film. The contributors provide a variety of theoretical and critical approaches to the process of bringing literary works to the screen. They consider a broad range of film and television adaptations, including several versions of Robinson Crusoe; three films of Moll Flanders; American, British, and French television adaptations of Gulliver's Travels, Clarissa, Tom Jones, and Jacques le fataliste; Wim Wender's film version of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprentice Years; the controversial film of Diderot's La Religieuese; and French and Anglo-American motion pictures based on Les Liaisons dangereuses among others. This book will appeal to students and scholars of literature and film alike.

This deeply researched collection offers a comprehensive introduction to the eighteenth-century trade in street literature – ballads, chapbooks, and popular prints – in England and Scotland. Offering detailed studies of a selection of the printers, types of publication, and places of publication that constituted the cheap and popular print trade during the period, these essays delve into ballads, slip songs, story books, pictures, and more to push back against neat divisions between low and high culture, or popular and high literature. The breadth and depth of the contributions give a much fuller and more nuanced picture of what was being widely published and read during this period than has previously been available. It will be of great value to scholars and students of eighteenth-century popular culture and literature, print history and the book trade, ballad and folk studies, children’s literature, and social history.

Analysing texts by Sterne, Smollett, Brooke, and Mackenzie, this book offers a new perspective on a question that literary criticism has struggled with for years: why are many sentimental novels of the 1700s so pervasively and playfully self-conscious, and why is this self-consciousness so often directed toward the materiality of the printed word?