Reading Fictions 1660-1740

English society in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was fascinated by deception, and concerns about deceptive narratives had a profound effect on reading practices. Kate Loveman's interdisciplinary study explores the ways in which reading habits, first developed to deal with suspect political and religious texts, were applied to a range of genres, and, as authors responded to readers' critiques, shaped genres. Examining responses to authors such as Defoe, Swift, Richardson and Fielding, Loveman investigates reading as a sociable activity. She uncovers a lost critical discourse, centred on strategies of 'shamming', which involved readers in public displays of reason, wit and ironic pretence as they discussed the credibility of oral and written narratives. Widely understood by early modern readers and authors, the codes of this rhetoric have now been forgotten, to the detriment of our perception of the period's literature and politics. Loveman's lively book offers a striking new approach to Restoration and eighteenth-century literary culture and, in particular, to understanding the development of the novel. Contents: Introduction; Sceptical reading in the 17th and early 18th centuries; The Strange Finding Out of Moses his Tombe: strategies and motives for hoaxing; 'Florishing lyes': coffee-house wit in the Restoration; More Shams Still: reading in the Popish Plot and Exclusion crisis; News, novels and imposture, 1688-1702; Defoe and his 'ill-disposed' readers; Swift's bites: 18th-century raillery in theory and practice; Bubbling sentiments: Richardson's Pamela and Fielding's Shamela; Conclusion; Select bibliography; Index.