Books by J. Paul Hunter
Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction
“By taking a close look at materials no previous twentieth-century critic has seriously investigated in literary terms―ephemeral journalism, moralistic tracts, questions-and-answer columns, ‘wonder’ narratives―Paul Hunter discovers a tangled set of roots for the early novel. His provocative argument for a new historicized understanding of the genre and its early readers brilliantly reveals unexpected affinities.” ―Patricia Meyer Spacks, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, University of Virginia What did people read before 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.
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Frankenstein The 1818 Text, Contexts, Nineteenth-century Responses, Modern Criticism
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, J. Paul Hunter
'I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.' A summer evening's ghost stories, lonely insomnia in a moonlit Alpine's room, and a runaway imagination -- fired by philosophical discussions with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley about science, galvanism, and the origins of life -- conspired to produce for Mary Shelley this haunting night specter. By morning, it had become the germ of her Romantic masterpiece, "Frankenstein." Written in 1816 when she was only 19, Mary Shelley's novel of 'The Modern Prometheus' chillingly dramatized the dangerous potential of life begotten upon a laboratory table. A frightening creation myth for our own time, "Frankenstein" remains one of the greatest horror stories ever written and is an undisputed classic of its kind.
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