Short Fiction in Peter Motteux’s «The Gentleman’s Journal» (1692-1694)

This collection brings together the short fictions published in Peter Motteux’s The Gentleman’s Journal, one of the main Restoration periodicals running from 1692 to 1694. These proto-novelistic fictions are accompanied by a scholarly introduction as well as notes and comments to make them more accessible to twenty-first-century readers. Published at a time when there was no firm agreement on the generic nature of short narrative prose fiction, this text corpus forms an important moment in the history of the novel. In the closing years of the seventeenth century, following major political revolutions, periodical culture in England began to develop. It nurtured an interest in all forms of reading material, including reading for pleasure in the form of narrative prose fiction. The generic and topical ranges included in the texts offered contemporary authors-to-be inspiration. This edition allows anybody interested in the history of the novel to see a genre being formed.