"Popular Legacies: The Politics of Custom in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction breaks new ground in the history of the eighteenth-century British novel by revealing the persistent influence of popular culture and of an older, patrician model of social relations--what Bowen terms "customary culture"--on novelistic representation as well as on the British imagination as a whole. Resisting a teleological literary history that views the novel's rise as one of increasing refinement and politeness, Bowen draws from a variety of popular sources, such as the criminal broadside, ballad, graphic prints and pantomimes to foreground the eighteenth-century novel's cultural and social hybridity. Popular Legacies further argues that representations of popular and laboring culture serve in the eighteenth-century novel as repositories of traditional social values, reflecting an older, two-part patrician-plebeian social order that authors such as Defoe, Richardson, Smollett and Godwin strategically mobilize in order both to impede and make palatable Britain's transition to a modern, capitalist and imperial state"--Provided by publisher.
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