Although the emergence of the English novel is generally regarded as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, this is the first book to be published professing to cover the 'eighteenth-century English novel' in its entirety. This Handbook surveys the development of the English novel during the 'long' eighteenth century-in other words, from the later seventeenth century right through to the first three decades of the nineteenth century when, with the publication of the novels of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, 'the novel' finally gained critical acceptance and assumed the position of cultural hegemony...