Novel Horizons

Gerd Bayer is Privatdozent in the English Department at the University of Erlangen

‘Gerd Bayer has written a remarkable introduction to Restoration fiction. Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction is really a novel-theory primer that revisits various theories of the novel in order to create an assessment of Restoration fiction’s claims on its readers. The time it takes to get to the substance of this argument is well spent in a wide-ranging discussion of what fiction means historically and culturally. I do not remember as rich and complex an account of the fiction of the Restoration, nor has any recent novel study adorned itself with such a shimmering complex of theoretical notions. When one steps back, what appears is a persuasive account of the meaning and transformations of genre, the emergence of character in an age of individualism, and the ways in which reality could be made to conform to the page. I can imagine that this book would be useful in more than a few graduate and undergraduate classrooms. It might also reinvigorate the history and theory of a genre that can be deceptively easy to underestimate.’George E. Haggerty, The University of California, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 57, No. 3, Summer 2017

• Introduction: making novel readers Part I: The rise of the novel as genre 1. The novel and its critics2. The temporality of genrePart II: Paratexts: the genesis of genre3. Seventeenth-century writing: shifting forms4. Paratext and drama 5. Paratext and prose Part III: The Restoration novel 6. Narrating, telling, and speaking 7. Types, characters, individuals8. Truth and fiction: reality and the pageConclusion: reading a genre into beingEndnotesBibliographyIndex