Alicante Journal of English Studies / Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses (RAEI) invites contributions to a special issue entitled “From Romance to Novel: Transitions of Genre in the Long Restoration Period” coordinated by Sonia Villegas-López (Universidad de Huelva, Spain) to be published in July 2026.

1 Submission details

Final essays should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words (including abstract, keywords, and bibliography). The deadline for completed manuscripts is 15 January 2026. These should be sent via the RAEI website, in the Special Issue 2026 section, following the guidelines for authors.

2 Abstract

The history of the novel in the long Restoration period, from 1660 to the early 1710s, is one of hybridisation and transnationality—from verse and drama to fiction, from romance to novel, from France, Spain and Italy to England, etc.— Many of the narrative species that proliferated at the time either disappeared or were assimilated by the elastic form of the novel in the decades that followed, and very popular texts did not pass the filter of the novel canon (Hume 2017, 28). Despite its interest as precedents of the genre, most examples of early prose fiction have been largely neglected by academia until relatively recent times and, except for a few canonical writers, the relevance of these early exemplars has been generally overlooked. Nevertheless, the work done by John Richetti (1969), Michael McKeon (1987), Paul Hunter (1992), or Josephine Donovan (1991), who proposed a new take on “the rise of the novel” debate, and more recently the proposals of Ros Ballaster (2005), Srinivas Aravamudan (2012), Gerd Bayer (2016), Jacqueline Glomski and Isabelle Moreau (2016), and Leah Orr (2017), have resituated the discussion about the early novel especially by claiming the need to investigate the genre’s origins and also by stating the importance of regarding the novel as a transnational venture.

Significantly, the study of the variety, cross-fertility and intersectionality of genre in the fiction of the period is one of the most challenging topics and the main goal that we plan to address in this special issue. The fiction published during the Restoration was experimental, both in contrast to Elizabethan novellas and the great canonical texts of the eighteenth century. Not only that, along the seventeenth century women began to be represented both as authors and ideally as alleged readers in fictional texts. In relation to the above, we aim at analysing more specifically the three areas of critical interest that Bayer associates with early prose fiction in the period: “looking at neglected works by established authors; including formerly ignored genres; and the reversal of former discrimination against kinds of authors, predominantly women writers” (2016, 2). In this light, we welcome contributions that consider the different subgenres of prose fiction in the light of their contribution to the formation of the novel, namely romance, picaresque and rogue fiction, gallant narrative, utopian writing, secret history, and fairy tale, among the most relevant ones. Precisely, taking for granted that genres are artificial categories, we wish to interpret them as historical constructs and cultural systems that might help us study the growth and diversity of prose fiction in the late seventeenth century. We propose to study both native and foreign works published in English in the long Restoration period to account for the different forms that the genre adopted and to illustrate the evolution of reading tastes.

We expect to answer some of the questions that this generic diversity poses to the contemporary scholar, and in so doing to contribute to expanding the extant knowledge on the origins and growth of the novel in England. Some topics of interest will be:

• Transitions and borders between fictional genres.
• Narrative experimentation at the levels of form and content.
• Dialogism and the early novel.
• Printing, bookselling, translation and the role of the author.
• Readers and reception in narratives of the long Restoration period.
• Transnational approaches to seventeenth-century prose fiction.
• Women’s contributions as romancers and early novelists.

3 Keywords

Restoration; prose fiction; genre and gender; bookselling; translation; print market; romance and novel.

4 Suggested bibliography and works cited

Aravamudan, Srinivas. 2012. Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P.

Baldner, R.W. 1967. Bibliography of Seventeenth-Century French Prose Fiction. New York: Modern Language Association of America.

Ballaster, Ros. 2005. Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785. Oxford: OUP.

Barnard, John and D.F. McKenzie, eds. 2002. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume IV 1557-1695. Cambridge: CUP.

Bayer, Gerd. 2016. Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction. Manchester: Manchester UP.

Braden, Gordon, et alii, eds. 2010. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume II, 1550-1660. Oxford: OUP.

Cressy, David.1980. Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge: CUP.

DeJean, Joan. 1981. Libertine Strategies: Freedom and the Novel in Seventeenth-Century France. Columbus: Ohio State UP.

DeJean, Joan. 1991. Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France. New York: Columbia UP.

Donovan, Josephine. 1998. Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Doody, Margaret Anne. 1996. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP.

Ezell, Margaret J.M. 1999. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP.

Ezell, Margaret J.M. 2017. The Later Seventeenth Century, Volume 5, 1645-1714. Oxford: OUP.

Feather, John. 1993. The Seventeenth-Century Book Trade. Loughborough: Loughborough University.

Feather, John. 1994. Publishing, Piracy, and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain. London: Mansell.

Febvre, Lucien and Henri-Jean Martin. 1976. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800. 1958. London: NLB.

Glomski, Jacqueline, and Isabelle Moreau, eds. 2016. Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text & Transmission. Oxford: OUP.

Hinks, John and Catherine Armstrong. 2008. Book Trade Connections from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries. Newcastle, Del: Oak Knoll Press; London: The British Library.

Hume, Robert D. 2017. Authorship, Publication, Reception (2): 1660-1750. The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. I, Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750. In Thomas Keymer (ed.). Oxford: OUP. 26-45.

Hunter, Paul J. 1990. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: W.W. Norton.

Johns, Adrian. 1998. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P.

Mander, Jenny, ed. 2007. Remapping the Rise of the European Novel. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.

McKenzie, D.F. 2002. Printing and Publishing 1557-1700: Constraints on the London Book Trades, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume IV, 1557-1695. In John Barnard, and D.F. McKenzie (eds.). Cambridge: CUP. 553-567.

McKeon, Michael. 1987. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

Mentz, Steve. 2006. Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Mish, Charles C. 1953. “Best Sellers in Seventeenth-Century Fiction”. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 47.4: 356-373.

Moretti, Franco. 2005. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso.

Newman, Karen, and Jane Tylus, eds. 2015. Early Modern Cultures of Translation. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P.

Orr, Leah. 2017. Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P.

Orr, Leah. 2023. Publishing the Woman Writer in England, 1670-1750. Oxford: OUP.

Pérez Fernández, José María, and Edward Wilson-Lee, eds. 2014. Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: CUP.

Raven, James. 2007. The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450-1850. New Haven and London: Yale UP.

Ray, William. 1990. Story and History: Narrative Authority and Social Identity in the Eighteenth-Century French and English Novel. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.

Richetti, John. 1969. Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700-1739. Oxford: Clarendon P.

Rosmarin, Adena. The Power of Genre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Rukavina, Alison. 2010. “Social Networks. Modelling the Transnational Distribution and Production of Books.” In Simon Frost and Robert William Jensen-Rix, eds. Moveable Type, Mobile Nations: Interaction in Transnational Book History. Kobenhavn: Museum Tusculanum P. 73-83.

Salzman, Paul. 1985. English Prose Fiction 1558-1700. Oxford: Clarendon P.

Shaw, David J. 2002. French-Language Publishing in London to 1900, Foreign-Language Printing in London 1500-1900. In Barry Taylor (ed.). Boston Spa & London, British Library. 101-122.

Warner, William B. 1998. Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750. Berkeley: U of California P.

Williams, Ioan. 1978. The Idea of the Novel in Europe, 1600-1800. London: Macmillan.