Includes bibliographical references and index.

PART I: 1660-1770: FROM 'NOVELS' TO WHAT IS NOT YET 'THE NOVEL' -- The economics of culture 1660-1770 -- 1. The Book Trade at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century / Peter Hinds -- 2. Business of Fiction: Novel Publishing, 1695-1774 / Michael F. Suarez, S.J. -- 3. Social Structure, Class, and Gender, 1660-1770 / Pat Rogers -- 4. Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-Habermasian Perspectives / Brian Cowan -- Influences on the early English novel -- 5. The Continental Influence on the Eighteenth-Century Novel: 'The English Improve What Others Invent' / Walter L. Reed -- 6. Criss-crossing the Channel: The French Novel and English Translation / Gillian Dow -- 7. Religious Writings and the Early Novel / W.R. Owens -- 8. Travel Literature and the Early Novel / Cynthia Wall -- 9. Secret History, Politics, and the Early Novel / Rebecca Bullard -- Early 'Novels' and Novelists -- 10. Restoration Fiction / Thomas Keymer -- 11. Testing the Market: Robinson Crusoe and After / David Oakleaf -- 12. Gulliver Effects / Clement Hawes -- 13. 'Labours of the Press': The Response to Pamela / Peter Sabor -- 14. Samuel Richardson and the Epistolary Novel / John Dussinger -- 15. Henry Fielding and the Progress of Romance / Scott Black -- 16. Novels of the 1750s / Simon Dickie -- 17. Sterne's Fiction and the Mid-Century Novel: The 'Vast Empire of Biographical Freebooters' and the 'Crying Volume' / Tim Parnell -- Epilogue: The English Novel at the end of the 1760s / J.A. Downie -- PART II: 1770-1832: THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL -- Literary Production, 1770-1832 -- 18. The Book Trade, 1770-1832 / John Feather -- 19. The Rise of the Illustrated English Novel to 1832 / Robert Folkenflik -- Authors, readers, reviewers, and critics, 1770-1832 -- 20. Social Structure, Class and Gender, 1770-1832 / W.A. Speck -- 21. 'Male' and 'Female' novels? Gendered Fictions and the Reading Public, 1770-1832 / Barbara M. Benedict -- 22. Reviewing the Novel / Antonia Forster -- 23. 'Ordering' Novels: Describing Prose Fiction, 1770-1832 / Peter Garside -- Novels and Novelists, 1770-1832 -- 24. The Rise and Decline of the Epistolary Novel, 1770-1832 / Ros Ballaster -- 25. Developments in Sentimental Fiction / Geoffrey Sill -- 26. Philosophical Fictions and 'Jacobin' Novels in the 1790s / Deidre Shauna Lynch -- 27. The Anti-Jacobin Novel / M.O. Grenby -- 28. The Gothic Novel and the Lingering Appeal of Romance / David H. Richter -- 29. Novel and Empire / Markman Ellis -- 30. The Popular Novel 1790 to 1820 / Gary Kelly -- 31. The Evangelical Novel / Lisa Wood -- 32. 'Pictures of domestic Life in Country Villages': Jane Austen and the 'Realist' Novel / Jan Fergus -- 33. Authorizing the Novel: Walter Scott's Historical Fiction / Ina Ferris -- 34. Parody and Satire in the Novel, 1770-1832 / Gary Dyer -- Epilogue: 'The English Novel at the End of the 1820s / J.A. Downie.

Although the emergence of the English novel is generally regarded as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, this is the first book to be published professing to cover the 'eighteenth-century English novel' in its entirety. This 'Handbook' surveys the development of the English novel during the 'long' eighteenth century-in other words, from the later seventeenth century right through to the first three decades of the nineteenth century when, with the publication of the novels of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, 'the novel' finally gained critical acceptance and assumed the position of cultural hegemony it enjoyed for over a century.