"Displacing the novel from the central position it has held in studies concerned with its origin or rise in England, Satire, History, Novel considers fictional narratives as part of a network of complementary and competing genres, including conjectural histories and narrative satires and regards relations among these forms as most significant and revealing. This is the first book to explore the emergence - and the fading - of narrative genres in the context of successive cultural paradigms and the uneven development of public spheres."--Jacket.