Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760-1830

Analysing genre-defining novels by Romantic period authors such as Mary Shelley, Charlotte Lennox, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen, Katrin Berndt argues that friendship functions as a literary expression of philosophical values in a genre that explores the psychology and the interactions of the individual in modern society. Contributing to our understanding of the complex interplay of philosophical, socio-cultural and literary discourses that shaped British fiction in the later Hanoverian decades, Berndt’s book demonstrates that novels have conceived the modern individual not in opposition to, but in interaction with society, continuing Enlightenment debates about how to share the lives and the experiences of others.