Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Fifteenth Anniversary Edition
• Introduction: Dialectical Method in Literary History
• Part I Questions of Truth
• Chapter 1 The Destabilization of Generic Categories
• Chapter 2 The Evidence of the Senses: Secularization and Epistemological Crisis
• Chapter 3 Histories of the Individual
• Part II Questions of Virtue
• Chapter 4 The Destabilization of Social Categories
• Chapter 5 Absolutism and Capitalist Ideology: The Volatility of Reform
• Chapter 6 Stories of Virtue
• Part III The Dialectical Constitution of the Novel
• Chapter 7 Romance Transformations (I) : Cervantes and the Disenchantment of the World
• Chapter 8 Romance Transformations (II) : Bunyan and Literalization of Allegory
• Chapter 9 Parables of the Younger Son (I) : Defoe and the Naturalization of Desire
• Chapter 10 Parables of the Younger Son (II) : Swift and the Containment of Desire
• Chapter 11 The Institutionalization of Conflict (I) : Richardson and the Domestication of Service
• Chapter 12 The Institutionalization of Conflict (II) : Fielding and the Instrumentality of Belief
• Conclusion
• Notes

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Library Journal Review

This may well be the most important study of the development of prose fiction in England since Ian Watt's classic Rise of the Novel (1957), on which it builds. Like Watt's study, it examines philosophical changes (``Questions of Truth'') and social-cultural changes (``Questions of Virtue'') in the early modern period to conclude that the novel ``emerged in early modern England as a new literary fiction designed to engage the social and ethical problems the established literary fictions could no longer mediate.'' It also offers provocative readings of several 17th- and 18th-century works. The Marxist/deconstructionist language will be difficult for undergraduates, but the astute philosophical, cultural, historical, and literary observations will fascinate and enlighten any scholar of the early modern period.Joseph Rosenblum, English Dept., Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

An extremely rich book, having a comprehensiveness of primary and secondary source material and a directness of argument that makes it a work of importance. Essentially, it is a response to ideas current since Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957), and the problem caused by Watt's defining the novel as a genre of formal realism that paralleled the rise of a commercial and industrial middle class. McKeon argues, dialectically, for instabilities in two areas: genre and society. The first concerns questions of literary truth; the second the relationships between a changing social order and the members of society. These he shows to be necessarily interrelated. The theoretical is supported by chapters about Cervantes, Bunyan, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, and Fielding. McKeon (Boston University) is also the author of Politics and Poetry in Restoration England (CH, Mar '76). Some books are useful. This one is indispensable to an academic library.-J. Wilkinson, Youngstown State University