Business of Fiction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael F. Suarez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Population Growth ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Book History ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Luxury Products

The eighteenth century witnessed a remarkable proliferation of print, with annual publications in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland increasing by more than 350 per cent from the first decade to the last. This chapter relates the growth in novel publishing between 1695 and 1774 to population growth and the growth in literacy. Recent research links the book trade keeping prices artificially high to readers’ consumption of novels as luxury products and evidence of social status. This trend is considered, along with remuneration for authors; the market for fiction; Irish reprints; continuations and spin-offs; abridgements and serializations; translations; circulating libraries; and the significance of book history to understanding the emergence and development of the novel.

The Book Trade at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hinds
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Book Production ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Expression

This essay provides an overview of the publishing context at the turn of the eighteenth century out of which the novel would emerge, including the development and early dominance of the London book, before going on to describe the conditions for the spread of printing and bookselling nationally from 1695 onwards. As well as considering book production, the essay examines readers’ experiences in the period, looking at the testimony of individual, historical readers, and some specific genres of writing—such as diaries, autobiographies, and collections of letters—often considered important for the emergence of the novel form. The essay then turns to establish the ‘conceptual horizons’ of readers’ expectations with regard to fiction—horizons which authors could work within or seek to challenge and push further by innovating new forms of literary expression, the novel amongst them.

4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Book History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sarah Fielding ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Approaches To Literature ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
Cognitive Literary Studies ◽  
New Perspective

The early novel developed modes of writing that are considered gripping and immersive, because they foreground physical states, meaningful gestures, and emotional excitement. This monograph shows how these changes relate to “embodied” and “enactive” cognition, “embed” themselves into the cultural and material contexts, and “extend” readers’ thoughts. In an investigation of works from Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, and Frances Burney, it traces the ways in which such “4E cognition” can contribute to a new perspective on stylistic and narrative changes in eighteenth-century fiction. The embodied dimension of literary language is then related to the media ecologies of letter writing, book learning, and theatricality in the eighteenth century. As the novel feeds off and into these social and material contexts, it comes into its own as a lifeworld technology that might not answer to standards of nineteenth-century realism but that feels real because it is integrated into the lifeworld and its embodied experiences. Together with the issue of realism, this book revisits traditional understandings of the “rise of the novel” and earlier historical perspectives in cognitive literary studies. And the perspective from 4E cognition, it is argued, opens links to book history and media ecologies that can launch historically situated cognitive approaches to literature.

Generating Captain Cook and Paul Kane into Published Authors: Case Studies of a Book History Model for Exploration and Travel Writing (pp 7-56)

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian MacLaren
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

As more and more research occurs into published English-language travel literature, the production of individual texts, rather than their authorship alone, demands attention. Both the unreliability of the text as entirely the traveller's or explorer's own and the question of whether or not the text narrates only his own experience and observations have made problematical the matter of interpretation. Recently, Percy G. Adams has shown in Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (1983) how, because travel writing issued often enough from writers who did no more than move around in an armchair, this genre and the novel grew indistinguishable for a time in the early eighteenth century. From then on, travel literature would often exemplify a more complex, or at least less straightforward, relation between experience and language than one might expect.

Introduction: How the Novel Found Its Feet

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Book History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Literary Studies ◽  
The Mind

The introduction presents an outline of 4E approaches to cognition and sketches how these approaches are brought to bear on developments in the eighteenth-century novel in this book. 4E cognition conceptualises cognition as embodied (as thinking is rooted in our bodies and their movement), embedded (as the mind/body connects to social environments and interactions with others), extended (as cognitive processes involve both the mind/body and material artefacts from the environment), and enactive (as perception depends on the body). The chapter briefly relates the contribution of this book to earlier work on literature from a 4E perspective in cognitive literary studies, as well as to the interest in materialism and book history in eighteenth-century studies.

scholarly journals “As Fully Incomprehensible as the Northern Lights”: Literary Identities in The Adventures of an Author

Authorship ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Ladd
Keyword(s):  
Original Composition ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Professional Authorship ◽  
The Republic ◽  
And Control ◽  
Literary Autobiography

This essay considers an anonymously-written and understudied novel, The Adventures of an Author (1767), as self-consciously reflecting the complexities and multiplicities of professional authorship in the mid-eighteenth century. Containing a vividly-realized fictive print society, this two-volume work revolves around the exploits of a writer-protagonist named Jack Atall who confusedly constructs his own literary autobiography. Investigating The Adventures of an Author as a comic negotiation of developing conceptions of authorship and the book trade, the novel is read as ironically underlining how discussions like Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition and Ralph’s Case of Authors fall short in defining and defending the professional author. It can be argued that Adventures represents the period’s conceptions of authorship as unstable, depicting the chaotic inclusivity of the Republic of Letters and the inability of authorial polemics to contain and control the operations of the literary marketplace.

Basic Andragogy-Oriented Strategies and Communication in Online Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 350-356
Author(s):  
Anca Sîrbu
Keyword(s):  
Adult Learners ◽  
Online Education ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Rapid Onset ◽  
Learning Goals ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Academic Education ◽  
Online Instructors ◽  
New Methods ◽  
The World

AbstractWith the rapid onset of an unprecedented lifestyle due to the new coronavirus COVID-19 the world academic scene was forced to reform and adapt to the novel circumstances. Although online education cannot be regarded as a groundbreaking endeavour anymore in the21st century, its current character of exclusivity calls for deeper understanding of, and a sharper focus on the “end-consumer” thereof as well as more cautious procedures to be exercised while teaching. While millennials are no longer thought of as being born with a silver spoon in their mouth but with an iPad or any sort of device in their hand (irrespective of their social status), adults are more hesitant when coerced to alter course unexpectedly and turn to new methods of attaining their learning goals. This is why proper communicative approaches need to be thoroughly considered by online instructors. This article aims at presenting teachers with a set of strategies to employ when the beneficiaries of online academic education are adult learners.

NOBILES PAUPERES: VILNIAUS MISIONIERIŲ ŠPITOLĖS GLOBOTINIAI XVIII A.

2018 ◽  
pp. 58-72
Author(s):  
Martynas Jakulis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
First Year ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Mission Hospital ◽  
Charity Hospital ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
Charitable Institution ◽  
The City ◽  
Qualitative Characteristics

In 1695, Jan Teofil Plater and his wife Aleksandra founded a hospital for six impoverished nobles in Vilnius. Situated near the newly built church of the Ascension and the convent of the Congregation of Mission in the Subocz suburb beyond the city walls, this hospital was the first and, until the end of the eighteenth century, the only charitable institution providing care for individuals of particular social status. The article, based on the hospital’s registry book and other sources, examines the quantitative, as well as qualitative characteristics of the institution’s clientele, such as its fluctuations in size, its social composition, and the causes of its inmates’ impoverishment. The research revealed that, despite the demand for care, the overseers managed to maintain a stable number of inmates, rarely admitting more than one or two persons every year, and thus ensuring a steady operation of the hospital (see table 1). However, in contrast with other charitable institutions in Vilnius, the clientele of the Congregation of Mission hospital changed frequently because of expulsions (39.6 percent of all cases) and inmates leaving the hospital on their own initiative (20.1 percent) already in the first year of their stay. The mortality of inmates (27.8 percent) affected the size and turnover of the clientele to a much lesser extent than observed in other hospitals. Although there are no reliable data on the inmates’ age and health, such statistics show that they probably were younger and healthier than the clients of other charitable institutions in Vilnius. Moreover, the Congregation of Mission hospital’s inmates differed from the clients of other institutions in respect of social composition. Impoverished petty nobles, originating mainly from the districts of Lida and Oszmiana, constituted the majority (56.25 percent) of the hospital’s inmates whose social status is noted in the registry book (62.5 percent). The nobles became clients of the Congregation of Mission hospital either because of old age, disability, as well as other accidental causes, or because of increased social vulnerability outside mutual aid networks, comprised of family members, kin or neighbours. The article argues that the foundation of a hospital designated to provide care primarily for impoverished nobles shows that the poverty of nobles was recognized by contemporaries as a social problem that should be tackled. Keywords: poverty, charity, hospital, the Congregation of Mission, Vilnius, nobles, eighteenth century.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.

Restoration Theatre and the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Transition ◽  
Strong Affinity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Restoration Theatre ◽  
Restoration Comedy ◽  
London Stage

This chapter explores the broad cultural transition from drama to novel during the Restoration period, which triggered one of the most productive periods in the history of the London stage. However, when it comes to the eighteenth century proper, the novel is more likely to be identified as the century's most significant and appealing popular genre. The chapter considers why the novel has largely superseded drama as the literary form to which ambitious and imaginative literary types without a strong affinity for verse writing would by default have turned their attention and energies by the middle of the eighteenth century. Something important may have been lost in the broad cultural transition from drama to novel. This chapter, however, contends that many things were preserved: that the novel was able to absorb many of the functions and techniques not just of Restoration comedy but of the theatre more generally.

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