Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel
Cheryl A Wilson
Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace
978 1 84893 207 4: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 84893 208 1
Fashion and celebrity may be twenty-first century obsessions, but they were also key concepts in Regency culture. Both celebrated and condemned for their popularity, silver fork novels were extremely prolific during this period. These texts detailed the lives and loves of London fashionables and in doing so became a form of conduct book, offering guidelines for members of the socially aspirant middle class. Wilson looks at the social and literary impact of this significant genre and charts its role in the development of the novel as a form and its status in the literary marketplace.
Sample pages
Readership
Literature, Romanticism and Regency Society
Contents
Introduction: Why Silver Fork? Why Now?
1 The World of Ton
2 Formulating a Genre
3 Educating Readers
4 Being Exclusive
5 Commercial Texts
6 Literary Contexts and Afterlives
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