Narrative realism has long been understood as a full account of "real life" and the individual self. Breaking with this traditional history, Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel demonstrates that the formal conventions of narrative realism emerged at the end of the seventeenth century in response to an explosion of partisan writings that offered rival versions of political selfhood. The novel mediated between the competing Whig, Tory, and Jacobite versions of selfhood that emerged during the upheavals of the 1680s and flourished through the mid 1750s. The...

A Tory pamphleteer, playwright and satirical historian, Delarivier Manley was regarded by her contemporaries Jonathan Swift and Robert Harley as a key member of the Tory propaganda team. This biography offers details about her life, including evidence about three illegitimate children by John Tilly, Governor of Fleet Prison.

A study of narrative realism in literature.

This collection explores for the first time the importance of secret history in literature of the long eighteenth century.