Overview

Re-Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel adds to the dynamically developing subfield of reception studies within eighteenth-century studies. Lipski shows how secondary visual and literary texts live their own lives in new contexts, while being also attentive to the possible ways in which these new lives may tell us more about the source texts. To this end the book offers five case studies of how canonical novels of the eighteenth century by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne came to be interpreted by readers from different historical moments. Lipski prioritises responses that may seem non-standard or even disconnected from the original, appreciating difference as a gateway to unobvious territories, as well as expressing doubts regarding readings that verge on misinterpretative appropriation. The material encompasses textual and visual testimonies of reading, including book illustration, prints and drawings, personal documents, reviews, literary texts and literary criticism. The case studies are arranged into three sections: visual transvaluations, reception in Poland and critical afterlives, and are concluded by a discussion of the most recent socio-political uses and revisions of eighteenth-century fiction in the Age of Trump (2016–2020).

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Jakub Lipski is associate professor and head of the Department of Anglophone Literatures at the Faculty of Literary Studies, Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz. He is the author of In Quest of the Self: Masquerade and Travel in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne (2014) and Painting the Novel: Pictorial Discourse in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (2018) as well as a number of articles and book chapters on eighteenth-century English literature. He has recently edited a collection of essays on the reception and afterlives of Robinson Crusoe – Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade Across Languages, Cultures, and Media (2020).

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