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Jane Austen's ironic reference to 'the trash with which the press now groans' is only one of innumerable Romantic complaints about fiction's newly overwhelming presence. This book draws on evidence from over one hundred Romantic novels to explore the changes in publishing, reviewing, reading, and writing that accompanied the unprecedented growth in novel publication during the Romantic period. With particular focus on the infamous Minerva Press, the most prolific fiction-producer of the age, Hannah Hudson puts its popular authors in dialogue with writers such as Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin. Using paratextual materials including reviews, advertisements, and authorial prefaces, this book establishes the ubiquity of Romantic anxieties about literary 'excess', showing how beliefs about fictional overproduction created new literary hierarchies. Ultimately, Hudson argues that this so-called excess was a driving force in fictional experimentation and the advertising and publication practices that shaped the genre's reception. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for det
Books and reading --- English fiction --- Fiction Appreciation --- History --- History and criticism. --- Minerva Press. --- Fiction --- Gothic fiction (Literary genre), English --- Publishing --- Appreciation --- Minerva Press --- History. --- English gothic fiction (Literary genre) --- Appraisal of books --- Books --- Choice of books --- Evaluation of literature --- Literature --- Reading, Choice of --- Reading and books --- Reading habits --- Reading public --- Reading --- Reading interests --- Reading promotion --- Metafiction --- Novellas (Short novels) --- Novels --- Stories --- Novelists --- Appraisal --- Evaluation --- Philosophy
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Between 1790 and 1820, William Lane’s Minerva Press published an unprecedented number of circulating-library novels by obscure female authors. Because these novels catered to the day’s fashion for sentimental themes and Gothic romance, they were and continue to be generally dismissed as ephemera. Recently, however, scholars interested in historicizing Romantic conceptions of genius and authorship have begun to write Minerva back into literary history. By making Minerva novels themselves the centre of the analysis, Minerva’s Gothics illustrates how Romantic ‘anxiety’ is better conceptualized as a mutual though not entirely equitable ‘exchange’, a dynamic interrelationship between Minerva novels and Romantic-era politics and poetics that started in 1780, when Lane began publishing novels with some regularity. Reading Minerva novels for their shared popular conventions demonstrates that circulating-library novelists collectively recirculate, engage and modify commonplaces about women’s nature, the social order and, most importantly, the very Romantic redefinitions of authorship and literature that render their novels not worth reading. By recognizing Minerva’s collaborative rather than merely derivative authorial model, a forgotten pathway is restored between first-generation Romantic reactions to popular print culture and Percy Shelley’s influential conceptualization of the poet in A Defence of Poetry.
Gothic fiction (Literary genre), English --- English fiction --- 028-055.2 --- 655.41 <41> --- English gothic fiction (Literary genre) --- 655.41 <41> Publishing in general. Publishing houses. Publishers--Verenigd Koninkrijk van Groot-Brittannië en Noord-Ierland --- 655.41 <41> Uitgeverij--algemeen--Verenigd Koninkrijk van Groot-Brittannië en Noord-Ierland --- Publishing in general. Publishing houses. Publishers--Verenigd Koninkrijk van Groot-Brittannië en Noord-Ierland --- Uitgeverij--algemeen--Verenigd Koninkrijk van Groot-Brittannië en Noord-Ierland --- 028-055.2 Vrouwelijke lezers --- Vrouwelijke lezers --- History and criticism --- Women authors --- E-books --- History and criticism. --- Minerva Press.
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