Early novelists such as Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe, and Laurence Stern helped create the formula for the modern novel. This title, The Eighteenth Century English Novel, part of Chelsea House Publishers' Period Studies series, features a selection of critical essays analyzing the writers and works that defined the eighteenth century. In addition to a chronology of the important cultural, literary, and politcal events that shaped this period, this text includes an introduction and editor's note written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.