New Species Of Criticism : Eighteenth-Century Discourse on the Novel

This work offers new prominence to the first century of theoretical and critical commentary on the English novel.

Moving ostensibly marginal texts (such as prefaces and reviews) to the foreground, the author demonstrates the role critical discourse played in establishing the genre within literary and popular culture, and the extent to which it anticipated many of the aesthetic and ethical issues that concern critics of fiction to the present day.