Professor Jordan Stein's New Book Reviewed by the NYRB

Fordham English Professor Jordan Stein's new book, When Novels Were Books, has been reviewed in the New York Review of Books alongside a new book by Anthony Grafton, one of the world's leading book historians.

Published this year by Harvard University Press, Professor Stein’s monograph shows how the physical format of the book shaped the stories that were printed in the eighteenth century. Novels in this time period were manufactured, sold, bought, owned, collected, and read alongside Protestant religious texts. As the novel developed into a mature genre, it had to distinguish itself from these similar-looking books and become what we now call “literature.”

In the September 24 issue of the NYRB, Leah Price writes that the origins of the novel have been a contested point in literary criticism at least since  Ian Watt’s 1957 Rise of the Novel. Parting from theorizations that start from formal characteristics of the genre, Price observes “Stein’s revisionist account of eighteenth-century print culture starts instead from objects.” Using bibliographical methodology, Professor Stein maps the novel’s history on to “the development of the book as a media platform.” Price writes:

Looking at the ways in which novels were used challenges the exceptionality of the genre. Watt placed the novel within a longer history of narrative, but When Novels Were Books places it instead with contemporaneous prose on both sides of the Anglophone Atlantic . . .