Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public Book

This is Dale Spender talking about this book: 'He devotes three hundred pages to male novelists and restricts his assessment of females to a single sentence: ''The majority of eighteenth century novels were actually written by women.'' '


This is the jacket blurb for Watt's book:

"The Rise of the Novel is Ian Watt's classic description of the interworkings of social conditions, changing attitudes, and literary practices during the period when the novel emerged as the dominant literary form of the individualist era. Erudite, yet gracefully written and often amusing, Watt's study examines the nature of the novel audience, the role of the book trade, and the changing structure of society at large."

Kind of makes you want to vomit, doesn't it?