Lennox and Smollett in the literary marketplace: Authorship and readership after Fielding and Richardson

This dissertation investigates the literary marketplace in the decades after 1750 and its relationship to the previously established literary and market dominance of Richardson and Fielding. The careers and works of Charlotte Lennox and Tobias Smollett are used as case studies of developments in the concepts of authorship and readership in the second half of the eighteenth century.;Smollett creates a position in opposition to Richardson and Fielding in his non-fictional writings such as the prefaces to Roderick Random and Ferdinand Count Fathom, his translation of Don Quixote, the journal Critical Review and his letters, promoting pleasure as the primary goal for literature. In his novel Sir Launcelot Greaves, he additionally conceives of his audience as a diverse group of readers who are already moral and need no explicit instruction. Smollett establishes a more direct connection between reader and author by publishing this novel in a periodical, where it reaches more readers and simultaneously brings the author more profit.;In her novel The Female Quixote, Lennox explicitly endorses the literary standards of Richardson and Fielding, but at the same time the body of the novel undermines their rejection of romance. The penultimate chapter presents a confusing argument between the protagonist Arabella and the divine where neither position is confirmed. In later works, especially the literary critical work Shakespear Illustrated, the periodical The Lady's Museum (including the novel Sophia), and her letters in the 1770s, Lennox continues to grapple with ideas of probability, decorum, and patronage, but never takes a clear stance of her own.;These writings indicate the exhaustion of the model of the "novel" propagated by Richardson and Fielding in the period after 1750, instead offering the idea of entertainment as a main goal of reading. They question the role of intermediaries in the literary marketplace such as booksellers and critics and argue for a closer relationship between readers and writers. While some authors are ambivalent about resisting the contemporary commonplaces of the literary realm, others end up in positions contrasting their predecessors and more amenable to the new literary market and, thereby earn a place in literary histories.