When Novels Were Books
This literary scholar explains in the book how the XVIII Century Novels were manifactured, read, bought. Novels, born as printed sheets ordered into a codex bound along one edge between boards or paper wrappers, later they would have been codified in other shapes.
The originality of this essay, pretty erudite, is this one: the revelation that novels were strickly cemented with Protestant religion.
With the time, christianity and Protestants made the difference. The importance of what to print was a priority and these novels, slowly became companions close to almanacs and protestant religious books, printed by the same printers.
Novel reading, with the time, became a central appointment for the middle-class citizens, females and not only... People could identitify themselves with the characters in the novel; these stories were in grade to touch the heart of readers. Samuel Pepys called the genre "diversion." After some while, novels could be largely found in many libraries, close to essays becoming evergreen classics.
The story of most classics and their advent in the society, including moral, religious impact, an example could be Crusoe (but there are many more) will be largely explained in this book like also a long digression about Protestants and influence in the society at many levels.
Recommended.
I thank Harvard University Press for the physical copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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