The strange and surprising adventures of a novel: Publishing Frances Burney's 'Cecilia

This study chronicles the publication history of Frances Burney's second novel, Cecilia, from its inception in 1780 through the present day Oxford World's Classics edition. It examines the many physical incarnations of this book and considers what these reveal about this novel's reading audience at various moments in time as well as the insight that these books, as artifacts, provide into the printing and publishing trends of two hundred years. It includes a discussion of foreign editions of Cecilia as this novel circulated in the global literary economy, and it narrates Cecilia's illustration history as its heroine and events were imagined and re-imagined through time. This study also supplies a detailed descriptive bibliography that serves as the foundation and evidence for the story that it narrates.