'Pamela' in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

by Thomas Keymer , Peter Sabor

• ISBN13: 9780521813372
• ISBN10: 0521813379
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-01-16
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) is often regarded as the first true novel in English and a landmark in literary history. The best-selling 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 book-length 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.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	viii
Acknowledgments	x
Introduction	1	(17)
1 'The Selling Part': publication, promotion, profits	18	(32)
2 Literary property and the trade in continuations	50	(33)
3 Counter-fictions and novel production	83	(31)
4 Domestic servitude and the licensed stage	114	(29)
5 Pamela illustrations and the visual culture of the novel	143	(34)
6 Commercial morality, colonial nationalism, and Pamela's Irish reception	177	(29)
Afterword	206	(10)
Appendix. A chronology of publications, performances and related events to 1750	216	(9)
Notes	225	(46)
Select bibliography	271	(17)
Index	288