A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighboring squire though he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. When Tom is banished to make his own fortune and Sophia follows him to London to escape an arranged marriage, the adventure begins. A vivid Hogarthian panorama of eighteenth-century life, spiced with danger and intrigue, bawdy exuberance and good-natured authorial interjections, Tom Jones is one of the greatest and most...

The responsiveness of Sterne's writing to a wide range of approaches and topics of recent and ongoing interest--among them narrative, interpretation, intertextuality, gender, the body, sentimentalism, and print culture--has ensured a wealth of recent activity in the journals. Two specialist periodicals, the Shandean and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, have become major repositories for innovative work on Sterne since their foundation in the late 1980s, and important new readings continue to appear in the established journals. The proliferation of periodical articles means, in...

"Tristram is the Fashion," Sterne gleefully wrote of his masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, in 1760. This study reads Sterne's writing alongside other trends and texts of the time, showing how Sterne created and sustained his own vogue through self-conscious play on his rivals' work. The result is a highly original account of a major early novelist, and of the way his writing reveals and defines what one witness called "this Shandy-Age."

Offering an introduction to British literature challenging traditional eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, this Companion explores the development of literary genres and modes in a period of rapid change. Its contributors demonstrate how literature was influenced by such historical factors as the development of the book trade, the rise of literary criticism and the expansion of commercial society and empire. Linking established authors with those gaining new attention from scholars, the collection's broad scope makes it essential reading for students of eighteenth-century literature and...

Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) is often regarded as the first true novel in English and a landmark in literary history. As the best selling novel of its time, it provoked a swarm of responses: panegyrics and critiques, parodies and burlesques, piracies and sequels, comedies and operas. The controversy it inspired has become a standard point of reference in studies of the rise of the novel, the history of the book and the emergence of consumer culture. In the first book-length study of the Pamela controversy since 1960, Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor offer an original definitive account of...

The responsiveness of Sterne's writing to a wide range of approaches and topics of recent and ongoing interest--among them narrative, interpretation, intertextuality, gender, the body, sentimentalism, and print culture--has ensured a wealth of recent activity in the journals. Two specialist periodicals, the Shandean and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, have become major repositories for innovative work on Sterne since their foundation in the late 1980s, and important new readings continue to appear in the established journals. The proliferation of periodical articles means, in...

Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) is often regarded as the first true novel in English and a landmark in literary history. As the best selling novel of its time, it provoked a swarm of responses: panegyrics and critiques, parodies and burlesques, piracies and sequels, comedies and operas. The controversy it inspired has become a standard point of reference in studies of the rise of the novel, the history of the book and the emergence of consumer culture. In the first book-length study of the Pamela controversy since 1960, Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor offer an original definitive account of...

Best known today for the innovative satire and experimental narrative of Tristram Shandy (1759 67), Laurence Sterne was no less famous in his time for A Sentimental Journey (1768) and for his controversial sermons. Sterne spent much of his life as an obscure clergyman in rural Yorkshire. But he brilliantly exploited the sensation achieved with the first instalment of Tristram Shandy to become, by his death in 1768, a fashionable celebrity across Europe. In this Companion, specially commissioned essays by leading scholars provide an authoritative and accessible guide to Sterne's writings in...

The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a 12-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the 'literary' novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and tendencies.
Volume 1 explores the long period between the origins of...