Born Yesterday

<p>Between the emergence of the realist novel in the early eighteenth century and the novel's subsequent alignment with self-improvement a century later lies a significant moment when novelistic characters were unlikely to mature in any meaningful way. That adolescent protagonists poised on the cusp of adulthood resisted a headlong tumble into maturity through the workings of plot reveals a curious literary and philosophical counter-tradition in the history of the novel. Stephanie Insley Hershinow's <em>Born Yesterday</em> shows how the archetype of the early realist novice reveals literary character tout court.</p><p>Through new readings of canonical novels by Samuel Richardson Henry Fielding Horace Walpole Ann Radcliffe Frances Burney and Jane Austen Hershinow severs the too-easy tie between novelistic form and character formation a conflation she argues of <em>Bild</em> with <em>Bildung</em>. A pop-culture-infused epilogue illustrates the influence of the eighteenth-century novice as embodied by Austen's <em>Emma</em> in the 1995 film <em>Clueless</em> as well as in dystopian YA works like <em>The Hunger Games</em>.</p><p>Drawing on bold close readings <em>Born Yesterday</em> alters the landscape of literary historical eighteenth-century studies and challenges some of novel theory's most well-worn assumptions.</p>