The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period

While poetry has been the genre most closely associated with the Romantic period, the novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has attracted many more readers and students in recent years. Its canon has been widened to include less well known authors alongside Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Love Peacock. Over the last generation, especially, a remarkable range of popular works from the period have been re-discovered and reread intensively. This Companion offers an overview of British fiction written between roughly the mid-1760s and the early 1830s and is an ideal guide to the major authors, historical and cultural contexts, and later critical reception. The contributors to this volume represent the most up-to-date directions in scholarship, charting the ways in which the period's social, political and intellectual redefinitions created new fictional subjects, forms and audiences.

Introduction Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener; 1. The historiography of fiction in the Romantic period Richard Maxwell; 2. Publishing, authorship, and reading William St Clair; 3. Gothic fiction Deidre Shauna Lynch; 4. The historical novel Richard Maxwell; 5. Thinking locally: novelistic worlds in provincial fiction Martha Bohrer; 6. Poetry and the novel Marshall Brown; 7. Orientalism and Empire James Watt; 8. Intellectual history and political theory Paul Keen; 9. Women writers and the woman's novel: the trope of maternal transmission Jill Campbell; 10. Tales for child readers Katie Trumpener; 11. Sentimental fiction Ann Wierda Rowland; 12. Fiction and the working classes Gary Kelly; 13. The Irish novel 1800–29 Ina Ferris; 14. Scotland and the novel Ian Duncan; Guide to further reading.

The novel of the Romantic period has attracted many more readers and students in recent years. This Companion offers an overview of British fiction written between the mid-1760s and the early 1830s and is an ideal guide to the major authors, historical and cultural contexts, and later critical reception.

Richard Maxwell is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University.
Katie Trumpener is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University.