Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction is a 1990 book by literary scholar and professor J. Paul Hunter. Hunter gives an account of the many non-fictional sources that led to the rise of the English novel, many of them non-literary. Overview Hunter argues that to understand the eighteenth-century English novel, we must understand the "pasts and traditions" from which the novel emerged, including journalism, occasional meditations, the related genres of Wonder books and Providence books, private diaries, didactic works, and travel narratives. Hunter gives a detailed history of the nature of these various types of works that helped foster the rise of the novel, and he explains the roles of writers, booksellers, and other people who ushered the English novel into existence. Reception Before Novels was highly praised in the academic press, where it was widely reviewed. Bridget Fowler in The British Journal of Sociology wrote, "If, as Hunter claims, the novel's imaginative form transcends its source, his research on the precise nature of that source is highly illuminating." Fowler went on to say that Hunter "makes such a good case for the important consequences of the role of the collective consciousness in the consumption of popular writing and novels, and especially its decisive impact in the initial dispute with the Augustans. His conclusion, then, is compelling. Rather than the work of a humanist elite, he asserts that it was 'the energies of popular culture (which) arrested the literary tradition from its conservative guardians'." Julia V. Douthwaite, writing in Harvard Book Review, hailed Before Novels as "a masterful attempt to synthesize the social, religious and economic forces which characterized English culture.... Hunter emphasizes the links between canonical "Literature" and the texts of popular culture—newspaper advice columns, vocational how-to books, personal diaries, and Protestant pedagogical tracts. He argues that the novels of Swift, Fielding and Richardson address the same hopes, fears and anxieties previously addressed by these second-rate "paraliterary" texts." Mark Spilka in Novel: A Forum on Fiction called Before Novels "a long-awaited magnum opus from a wise, honorable, sophisticated, and amazingly informed expounder of the novel's rise and of the newly exciting age which made it possible. Though not as revolutionary as Watt's classic study, Hunter's multivalent, standard-setting volume will serve handsomely as its critical and cultural equivalent for our own exciting times." D. E. Richardson in The Sewanee Review was laudatory in his review: "Hunter