Download or read book Before Novels written by J. Paul Hunter and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1990 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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