Novel Marketing, Novel Writing, and the Development of the Adolescent, 1740-1815

FAIN: FT-265388-19

Katherine B. Gustafson
Indiana University Northwest (Gary, IN 46408-1101)

Completion of the first book-length study of adolescence as a modern social category in 18th-century British novels and its affiliated marketing industry.

I seek support from the NEH to complete the last chapter of a scholarly monograph. My book, "Novel Marketing, Novel Writing, and the Development of the Adolescent, 1740-1815," argues that the evolution of the novel in eighteenth-century England occurred in dynamic response to the development of adolescence as a modern social category. It contributes to humanistic study both by rewriting the history of the novel and by providing a history of eighteenth-century adolescence. By historicizing the conditions under which canonical eighteenth-century novels were written, published, and marketed, my work restores adolescence to its rightful place within the novel’s evolution, and demonstrates that many of the novel’s formal developments responded to cultural anxieties about adolescent readers. My last chapter will examine works by Sir Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth to demonstrate the increased stratification of the novel market for adolescents in the early nineteenth century.