Preface

Preface The vigorous response to our call for papers on the topic of this special number of Eighteenth-Century Fiction is indicative of the importance attached to the historical link between fiction and print culture. The novel is one of the major expressions of print technology and of the new world that the print revolution helped to bring into being. No other literary genre can be said to be so utterly dependent upon the invention of printing for its existence. Portable and increasingly affordable, the eighteenth-century novel encouraged the pursuit ofprivacy and solitary reading and with it reflection, introspection, and imaginative excitement, thereby contributing immeasurably to the growth of individualism. The emphasis upon individual rights and freedom, which the novel so often chronicles and encourages, is one of the key historical markers of the modern world. The essays in this collection examine eighteenth-century fiction as the product of print culture. We have arranged them under three broad headings—Author and Book; Book Illustration; and the History of the Book. The first group of essays confronts the problems of authorship: literary strategies such as authors posing as their own editors ; new marketing strategies as authors repositioned themselves after the rise of the literary reviews at mid-century and carved out new roles for themselves in an increasingly commercial and literate society; and the special problem faced by women novelists in establishing a professional identity. The second group ofessays comprises seven studies ofillustrations in novels—from broad surveys of the evolution of the illustrations of the French novel over the course of the century and of the link between the novel as printed and illustrated book to more detailed ? EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION examinations of the relationship between author and artist. One essay traces the subde and complex depiction of sentimental expression and the cultural shift that it indicates, while another outlines the reception ofSterne's SentimentalJourney as depicted in illustrated editions. The bibliographical and historical essays in the third group analyse the significance in the history of eighteenth-century prose fiction of such matters as the physical production and appearance of novels and other works of prose fiction; the role of the apparatus criticus (now often called the "paratext"); the statistical growth in French fiction in the first half of the century and ofone of the defining anthologies of French fiction in the second half; the movement in both directions of imaginative prose fiction between Germany and England in the last twenty years of the century; the network of French itinerant pedlars and their role in the dissemination of novels at the end ofthe century; and the economic and political constraints upon the publication of novels as France moved from the ancien regime into the modern world. To round out this rich and varied collection of articles on eighteenth-century fiction Carl Spadoni of the McMaster University Library offers us his reflections as a rare books librarian on "Collecting Eighteenth-Century English Novels in the Twenty-First Century." ...