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Novel horizons analyses how narrative prose fiction developed during the English Restoration. It argues that following the reopening of the theatres in 1660, generic changes within dramatic texts occasioned an intense debate within prologues and introductions. This discussion about the poetics of a genre was echoed in the paratextual material of prose fictions: in trans¬lators’ introductions, authorial prefaces, and other accompanying material. In the absence of an official poetics that defined prose fiction, paratexts ful¬filled this function and informed readers about the changing features of the budding genre. This study traces the piecemeal development of these generic boundaries and describes the generic competence of readers through the detailed analysis of paratexts and actual narrative prose fictions. Rather than trying to canonize individual Restoration novels, Novel horizons covers the surviving textual material widely, focusing on narrative prose fictions published between 1660 and 1710. Drawing on genre theories by Jacques Derrida and M.M. Bakhtin, the study follows an approach to genre that sees a textual corpus as an archive that projects into the future, thereby enabling later readers and writers to experiment with forms and themes. In addition to tracing the paratextual poetics of Restoration fiction, a substantial section of this book covers the state of the art of fiction-writing during the period. It discusses aspects such as character development, narrative point of view, and questions of fictionality and realism in order to describe how these features were first used in popular fiction at the time.
the very act of reading can transform reading subjects into citizens, I rely on reader-response theory and theories of identification and disidentification to provide critical vocabulary, as well as drawing on postcolonial theories of métissage and hybridity to theorise the relationship between the author, the reader, and the text in the context of queer citizenship. Reader- response criticism, the strand of literary theory that is interested in examining the reader’s role in the reading process, originally emerged from the debate surrounding a particular group of
Once the reader decides to read the text as a translation, the reading process will inevitably consist of a back-and-forth between text and (actually perceived or remembered) image. On the material level, the text remains a monomedial verbal construct referring in diverse ways, and possibly on several levels, to a configuration in a visual 248 Modern and postmodern encounters medium. But in terms of reader response criticism the reader engages with an intermedial translation both as a genetic process and as a product. In their essay ‘C. S. Peirce and
this sense, it considers the activities of a variety of American and (West) German, state and non-state actors to influence what interpretations are published or circulated (for further images of Germany as a Western ally, see Siegfried Schieder in Chapter 10 of this volume). Finally, it seeks to understand how these public works are received. Rooted in the work of reader-response criticism and reception theory, it incorporates evidence of how these works are understood and received historically. This chapter ultimately argues that the meanings of these cultural
’, as she ‘argues for “a purely literary enjoyment and appreciation” of the poem and focuses on the poem's use of imagery’. 45 Gwinn's proposed methodology is a kind of late nineteenth-century anticipation of reader-response criticism: ‘we shall do best to confine ourselves strictly to the poem itself, and be very honest with ourselves about the impressions we receive from it, and scrupulous in our way of noting them’. 46 And in contrast to Tolkien's motionless