The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century Novel

Twelve contributors reveal recent diverse approaches to what is conveniently labelled as the eighteenth‐century novel. As John Richetti indicates in his introductory essay, “Those narratives from the eighteenth century that we call novels include a wide‐range of distinct books and stories, and they comprise a large variety of rival, competing approaches to the problem of fictional storytelling”. J. Paul Hunter contributes the first essay in “The novel and social/cultural history”, explaining in clear tabular form the components of “the new cultural history”, its premisses, and conclusions. These are then applied to novel and eighteenth‐century writers. Defoe is the focus of...