View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Cleveland State University EngagedScholarship@CSU English Faculty Publications English Department 2015 Slipping from Secret History to Novel Rachel K. Carnell Cleveland State University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cleng_facpub Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons How does access to this work benefit oy u? Let us know! Publisher's Statement This work remains under copyright © 2014 Eighteenth-Century Fiction, McMaster University, doi: 10.3138/ecf.28.1.1, http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/ecf.28.1.1 Recommended Citation Carnell, Rachel K., "Slipping from Secret History to Novel" (2015). English Faculty Publications. 78. https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cleng_facpub/78 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English Department at EngagedScholarship@CSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of EngagedScholarship@CSU. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Slipping from Secret History to Novel Rachel Carnell abstract The secret history, a genre of writing made popular as opposition political propaganda during the reign of Charles ii, has been the subject of renewed critical interest in recent years. By the mid- 1740s, novelists were using markers of secret histories on the title pages of their works, thus blurring the genres. This forgot- ten history of the secret history can help us understand why Ian Watt and other twentieth-century critics tended to end their nar- ra tives of the rise of the “realist” Whig novel with the works of the Tory novelist Jane Austen.