Description: A definitive account of the enormous cultural impact of the first true novel in English, Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740).
Brief description: Thomas Keymer is Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. His recent books include Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (2002), Richardson's Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (2004), and Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (with Peter Sabor, 2005). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to English Literature from 1740 to 1830 (with Jon Mee, 2004) and The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (in progress), and co-general editor, with Peter Sabor, of The Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (in progress).
Review Quotes: "A very readable book...giving an interesting picture of Grub Street, the sometimes-cutthroat world of publishing, theater before and after the Licensing Act, issues of social rank and class, and English popular culture of the time." -- Choice