By according a central place to the history of reading, Circles of learning radically rethinks the nature of first-person narrative during this period and reconsiders its relation to the autobiographical discourse. Jenny Mander argues that to understand better both the history of the novel and that of the autobiography we need first to examine the position of the modern reader.  The study begins with a critical analysis of Genettian narratology in order to foreground a number of important presuppositions of twentieth-century reading practices, and it goes on to show how these have shaped...

Fifty years on from Ian Watt’s pioneering study, The Rise of the novel, Jenny Mander brings together the work of bibliographers, literary scholars and socio-cultural historians to present a new European perspective on the development of the genre. Remapping the rise of the European novel investigates how prose fiction between 1500 and 1800 was simultaneously shaped by the development of the nation-state and by multiple crossings of geographical, cultural and linguistic boundaries. Drawing on evidence from France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Russia, Greece, as well as England, authors argue...

Histoire des deux Indes, was arguably the first major example of a world history, exploring the ramifications of European colonialism from a global perspective. Frequently reprinted and translated into many languages, its readers included statesmen, historians, philosophers and writers throughout Europe and North America. Underpinning the encyclopedic scope of the work was an extensive transnational network of correspondents and informants assiduously cultivated by Raynal to obtain the latest expert knowledge. How these networks shaped Raynal’s writing and what they reveal about...