'Pamela' in the Marketplace

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 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.

'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, ' … a lively and informative analysis … admirable and enjoyable …' Notes and Queries

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). Peter Sabor is Director of the Burney Centre and Canada Research Chair in Eighteenth-Century Studies at McGill University, Montreal.