The National Book League was a precursor to the current Booktrust, issued Reader's Guides on a variety of subjects, each written by an author with expertise in that field. Originally published in 1947, this volume is devoted to Victorian fiction, covering a broad range of genres and subject matter.

No genre manifests the pleasure of reading—and its power to consume and enchant—more than romance. In suspending the category of the novel to rethink the way prose fiction works, Without the Novel demonstrates what literary history looks like from the perspective of such readerly excesses and adventures. Rejecting the assumption that novelistic realism is the most significant tendency in the history of prose fiction, Black asks three intertwined questions: What is fiction without the novel? What is literary history without the novel? What is reading without the novel? In answer, this study draws on the neglected genre of romance to reintegrate eighteenth-century British fiction with its classical and Continental counterparts. Black addresses works of prose fiction that self-consciously experiment with the formal structures and readerly affordances of romance: Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Burney’s The Wanderer. Each text presents itself as a secondary, satiric adaptation of anachronistic and alien narratives, but in revising foreign stories each text also relays them. The recursive reading that these works portray and demand makes each a self-reflexive parable of romance itself. Ultimately, Without the Novel writes a wider, weirder history of fiction organized by the recurrences of romance and informed by the pleasures of reading that define the genre.

Japanese Literary Theories: An Anthology is the English translation of the 2017 volume edited by Yasusuke Ōura (Nihon Bungaku Riron: Ansorojii), which grew from a unique collaboration between scholars of Western literatures and scholars of modern Japanese literature. Its eight thematic chapters on various aspects of literary theory each contain excerpts from representative texts by Japanese intellectuals, discussed against the background of Japan’s ongoing negotiations with foreign ideas. The anthology offers a comprehensive image of the development of Japanese literary theories, from the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868 and up to the present day. The translation of this anthology, another collaborative project, brings to the English-speaking reader heretofore untranslated pieces by Japanese critics, scholars, and creative writers, providing a point of entry into a variety of intellectual discourses from modern and contemporary Japan. It enriches the repertoire of literary theories available in English, while shedding light on the ways in which literature and literary theory travel back and forth within various linguistic spheres, serving as central loci of intellectual negotiation.

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. By situating the novels of the period which are still read today against the background of the hundreds published between 1660 and 1830, this Handbook not only covers those 'masters and mistresses' of early prose fiction-such as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney, Scott and Austen-who are still acknowledged to be seminal figures in the emergence and development of the English novel, but also the significant number of recently-rediscovered novelists who were popular in their own day. At the same time, its comprehensive coverage of cultural contexts not considered by any existing study, but which are central to the emergence of the novel, such as the book trade and the mechanics of book production, copyright and censorship, the growth of the reading public, the economics of culture both in London and in the provinces, and the re-printing of popular fiction after 1774, offers unique insight into the making of the English novel.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1873. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

Patrick Parrinder traces English prose fiction from its late medieval origins through its stories of rogues and criminals, family rebellions and suffering heroines, to the contemporary novels of immigration. He provides both a comprehensive survey and a new interpretation of the importance of the English novel.