Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

What did people read <em>before</em> there were novels? Not necessarily just other "literary" works, according to this fascinating study of the beginnings of the English novel. To understand the origins of the novel as a species and to read individual novels well, we must know several pasts and traditions--even non-fictional and non-narrative traditions, even non-"artistic" and non-written pasts--that at first might seem far removed from the pleasures readers find in modern novels.