Arguably the first English novel, Daniel Defoe’s prose romance Robinson Crusoe recounts the fictional adventures of the title character, an ambitious Englishman, through Crusoe’s first-person autobiographical narrative. In the formally titled The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,… Read More ›
Long touted as the first English novel, or at the least the first epistolary novel, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela has since had both those positions questioned in light of work by earlier writers, most notably Aphra Behn. It remains of extreme… Read More ›
In her fourth novel, Ann Radcliffe explores the machinery of the Gothic novel but reveals the mysteries referenced in her most popular work’s title. Its popularity validated her publisher’s interest in the work, which had gained unprecedented support by the… Read More ›
Henry Mackenzie’s A Man of Feeling owed a debt to Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748). Like Smollett’s protagonist, the good-hearted Harley of Mackenzie’s tale is a naive traveler in a too-sophisticated world, sacrificed to professional cardsharps. A narrator that readers… Read More ›
The sole novel written by Robert Paltock, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, is one of the earliest written examples of science fiction in English, enjoyed as children by notables including the poet Robert Southey; critic, poet, and journalist… Read More ›
When Tobias Smollett published the last of his novels, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, he used the familiar epistolary novel form first made famous by Samuel Richardson. Five of his flat, predictable characters wrote letters that differed in their points… Read More ›
The first three volumes of Thomas Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor appeared in 1794. In October of that year, before he could add the final three volumes to his novel, Holcroft went to Newgate Prison on a charge of high treason due… Read More ›
When Samuel Richardson began The History of Sir Charles Grandison, he had no plan other than to present a moral tale to counter the bawdy tone and content of Henry Fielding’s wildly popular The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling… Read More ›
Jonathan Swift likely began writing Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships five years before its publication. Later known simply as Gulliver’s Travels,… Read More ›
Fanny Burney published her first work, Evelina, anonymously, basing it on a piece of juvenilia titled The History of Caroline Evelyn, which she had destroyed on the advice of her stepmother. As an account of the unhappy life of Evelina’s… Read More ›
Samuel Richardson published his second novel in seven volumes, the first two in 1747, and the remaining five the next year. Like his first work, Pamela (1740), Clarissa is an epistolary novel, made up of letters written between characters. While… Read More ›
William Makepeace Thackeray’s first novel, The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Romance of the Last Century by Fitz-Boodle [The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.], appeared in Fraser’s Magazine as a monthly serial in 1844. It was later revised and released… Read More ›
A label often applied to the last half of the 18th century, the Age of Johnson takes its name from Samuel Johnson, lexicographer, critic, scholar, poet, and novelist most well known for his DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1755). With… Read More ›
Sarah Fielding described David Simple as a “moral romance.” The episodic novel took a timely approach to the romance genre, moving away from the traditional chivalric tales to a story based on codes of middle-class ideology. Modern critics note that… Read More ›
Sentimental fiction was pervasive in early Republican literature, not only among the published novels but also in the sketches, stories, and serializations of fiction that appeared in early American magazines. Among the most popular works imported from England throughout the… Read More ›
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