Includes bibliographical references and index.

Secularizing ethics: from Pamela to Tom Jones -- Opposition and persuasion: from Roderick Random to Humphry Clinker -- Rewriting ethics: David Simple, The female Quixote and Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph -- Tristram Shandy: Latitudinarianism and liberty -- Hurtful insignificance: the novel in the later eighteenth century.

Print version record.

Linking the decline in Church authority in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the increasing respectability of fiction, Carol Stewart provides a new perspective on the rise of the novel. The resulting readings of novels by authors such as Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, Charlotte Lennox, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and Jane Austen shed light on the literary marketplace and the status of writers.