Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s [Hardcover]

Susan Carliles edited collection Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s, focuses on a vibrant but often overlooked period for the novel. The volume includes a strong range of essays by Kathryn King, Betty Schellenberg, Aleksondra Hultquist, Karen Cajka, Patricia Hamilton, Martha Kvande, and Carlile herself.Masters of the Marketplace is the first book to address the importance of the 1750s in literary history and to consider the active role that women novelists played in the formation of the novel. It highlights how women novelists of the 1750s controlled their literary circumstances. These authors were particularly agile at responding to the changing literary marketplace, the emergent domestic ideal, varied reader responses, shifting notions of genre, and new developments in epistemology. Reading these essays side by side brings to light the fact that women novelists of the 1750s engaged in a critical renovation of the novel as a genre and reclaimed it for a proto-feminist project, challenging, educating, and joining their readers.Discussions about the development of the novel often jump directly from the 1740s, when Richardson and Fielding were particularly successful, to the 1770's, when women supposedly entered the marketplace in greater numbers. The little scholarship that focuses on the British novel in the 1750s has primarily addressed male output and concluded that the genre was faltering and in danger of extinction. Masters of the Marketplace is the first volume specifically to assess the importance of the 1750s in literary history and to argue that women novelists engaged in critical renovation of the novel as a genre and reclaimed it as a proto-feminist project. This book highlights how these women controlled their literary circumstances, mining their prospects and nimbly responding to the changing literary marketplace, the emergent domestic ideals, varied reader responses, shifting notions of genre, and new developments in epistlC¶