The Spread of Novels

"McMurran draws convincing connections among the formations of nation, cosmopolitanism, and the novel, and she demonstrates the importance of the eighteenth century in producing these shifts. Her original and well-informed approach will attract considerable attention."--Felicity Nussbaum, University of California, Los Angeles
"This important book establishes why the novel is not just English and why, indeed, even the English novel was never just English, or transatlantic, or Anglophone, but first and foremost translated and trans-Channel. I admire McMurran's conceptualization of translation's role in the formation of the novel in Europe and its colonies, and the fresh interpretations of texts, deftly combined with historical detail, from which her conclusions are drawn."--April Alliston, Princeton University

Mary Helen McMurran is assistant professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.

McMurran's book valuably examines translation's role in the beginnings of English copyright law... In demonstrating that nations believed to be unilingual were really multilingual, in affirming their readers' cosmopolitanism to the extent that they dipped into others' literatures, McMurran and her fellow essayists add significantly to studies of the English novel. -- Nancy Vogeley Eighteenth-Century Studies