OXF HIST NOV ENG TO 1750 VOL 1 OHNE C

The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a 12-volume series presenting a comprehensive global and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole not just the ''literary'' novel and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production distribution and reception and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres as well as outlining the work of major novelists movements traditions and tendencies.Volume 1 explores the long period between the origins of printing in late fifteenth-century England and the establishment of the novel as a recognized reputable genre in the mid eighteenth century. Later chapters in the volume provide original authoritative accounts of innovations by the major canonical authors notably Defoe Richardson and Fielding who have traditionally been seen as pioneering ''the rise of the novel'' in Ian Watt''s famous phrase. With its extended chronological and geographical range however the volume also contextualizes these eighteenth-century developments in revelatory new ways to provide a fresh bold and comprehensive account of the richness and variety of fictional traditions as they developed over two and a half centuries. The volume thus establishes a newly comprehensive mapping of early fiction that rectifies the shortcomings and exclusions of established ''rise of the novel'' scholarship. These include the relative neglect of the importance of women writers following Behn''s reinvention of romance in the 1680s in shaping novelistic themes and techniques; a restrictive generic definition based on circumstantial and psychological realism to the exclusion of non-realist modes that flourished for centuries beforehand; a teleological bias that overlooks or downgrades phases and types of fiction production such as the richly variegated category of Elizabethan fiction that resist being assimilated into narratives of evolution or ascent; a reductive Anglocentrism that leaves out of account the translation reception and pervasive influence from the sixteenth century onwards of among much else the ''ancient novel'' of Apuleius and Heliodorus; Byzantine Arabian and Eastern traditions; the Italian novella from Boccaccio to Bandello; Spanish picaresque and anti-romance; and a range of French narrative modes from Rabelais to Marivaux. Alongside these key contexts the volume treats the emergent novel as above all a phenomenon of print culture with close attention to conditions of authorship publishing and reading across the extended period.