The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Daniel Cook · Nicholas Seager

Sep 2015 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction probes the adaptation and appropriation of a wide range of canonical and lesser-known British and Irish novels in the long eighteenth century, from the period of Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood through to that of Jane Austen and Walter Scott. Major authors, including Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne, are discussed alongside writers such as Sarah Fielding and Ann Radcliffe, whose literary significance is now increasingly being recognised. By uncovering this neglected aspect of the reception of eighteenth-century fiction, this collection contributes to developing our understanding of the form of the early novel, its place in a broader culture of entertainment then and now, and its interactions with a host of other genres and media, including theatre, opera, poetry, print caricatures and film.

About the author

Daniel Cook is Lecturer in English at the University of Dundee. He is the author of Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760–1830 (2013), the editor of The Lives of Jonathan Swift (2011) and the co-editor (with Amy Culley) of Women's Life Writing: Gender, Genre, and Authorship, 1700–1850 (2012). Daniel has published essays on a range of topics ranging from Pope to Wordsworth in such journals as The Library, Philological Quarterly, and The Review of English Studies.

Nicholas Seager is Lecturer in English at Keele University. He has published essays on authors ranging from John Bunyan to Oliver Goldsmith, and in journals including the Modern Language Review, The Library, Philological Quarterly, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and The Eighteenth-Century Novel. He is the author of The Rise of the Novel: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism (2012) and a forthcoming monograph, Daniel Defoe and the History of Fictional Form.