Studies of the novel have sought the genres rise in eighteenth-century Britain when, as one old story goes, a new middle class with time on their hands and money in their pockets developed a sudden taste for literary realism and character interiority. Yet, what we think of as the novel was only a fraction of the eras prose fiction. The literary marketplace proliferated with what booksellers called romances, secret histories, adventures, narratives, and tales moral, oriental, and gothic. Eighteenth-century readers (and writers!) read them all. In this class, we will consider the eighteenth-century novels usual suspects (by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen) alongside works that challenge the novel as a tidy category (by Penelope Aubin, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Fielding, Samuel Johnson, and Charlotte Lennox). How does broadening the way we understand eighteenth-century reading culture change our ideas about where novels came from, how narrative works, and what fiction can do?
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