Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) is often regarded as the first true novel in English and a landmark in literary history. The best selling novel of its time, it provoked a swarm of responses: panegyrics and critiques, parodies and burlesques, piracies and sequels, comedies and operas. The controversy it inspired has become a standard point of reference in studies of the rise of the novel, the history of the book and the emergence of consumer culture. In the first book-length study of the Pamela controversy since 1960, Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor offer a fresh and definitive account of the novel\'s enormous cultural impact. Above all, they read the controversy as a market phenomenon, in which the writers and publishers involved were competing not only in struggles of interpretation and meaning but also in the larger and more pressing enterprise of selling print.

• Major new account of a landmark literary controversy of the eighteenth century • Compelling case study in the rise of the novel genre and the emergence of the marketplace for print • Full of new discoveries and research - the definitive account of this important development for the novel

Introduction; 1. \'The selling part\': publication, promotion, profits; 2. Literary property and the trade in continuations; 3. Counter-fictions and novel production; 4. Domestic servitude and the licensed stage; 5. Pamela illustrations and the visual culture of the novel; 6. Commercial morality, colonial nationalism, and Pamela\'s Irish reception; Afterword; Appendix: A chronology of publications, performances and related events to 1750; Select bibliography; Index.

\'This excellent book derives from Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor\'s previous joint work - The \'Pamela\' Controversy … Providing a wealth of new information in a crisp, witty narrative, it goes far beyond the previous commentaries on the subject of Pamela as a phenomenon of the commercial marketplace. …this book\'s dazzling command of historical evidence renders in depth the whole complex dynamics of eighteenth-century cultural production\' Modern Language Review