'Pamela' in the marketplace : literary controversy and print culture in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland / Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Keymer, Thomas, 1962-

Contributor:

Sabor, Peter.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761. Pamela.

Richardson, Samuel.

English literature--Publishing.

English literature.

English fiction--Marketing--History--18th century.

English fiction.

Marketing.

History.

Physical Description:

x, 295 pages : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Summary:

Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) is often regarded as the first true novel in English and a landmark in literary history. The bestselling novel of its time, it provoked a swarm of responses: panegyrics and critiques, parodies and burlesques, piracies and sequels, comedies and operas. The controversy it inspired has become a standard point of reference in studies of the rise of the novel, the history of the book and the emergence of consumer culture. In the first booklength study of the Pamela controversy since 1960, Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor offer a fresh and definitive account of the novel's enormous cultural impact. Above all, they read the controversy as a market phenomenon, in which the writers and publishers involved were competing not only in struggles of interpretation and meaning but also in the larger and more pressing enterprise of selling print.

Contents:

1 'The Selling Part': publication, promotion, profits 18

2 Literary property and the trade in continuations 50

3 Counter-fictions and novel production 83

4 Domestic servitude and the licensed stage 114

5 Pamela illustrations and the visual culture of the novel 143

6 Commercial morality, colonial nationalism, and Pamela's Irish reception 177

Appendix A chronology of publications, performances and related events to 1750 216.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0521813379

OCLC:

62132875

Publisher Number:

9780521813372