The corpus of the ENEID Project is composed of some 600 texts, which we will classify chronologically attending to two different phases.

1660-1685: This first phase corresponds to Charles II’s reign, and to his promotion of the arts, particularly drama. After the merging of the two theatre companies in 1682 into one, the United Company, and Charles II’s death, the number of prose fiction texts begins to grow exponentially. The last romances in English are published –The Parly of Beasts (1660), Aretina (1660), Eliana (1661), Pandion and Amphigenia (1665) –, and a good number of translations and adaptations from the French appear in English, La Calprenède’s Cassandra (1667, 1676) and Pharamond (1662), among them. Additionally, the six volumes of Robert Boyle’s Parthenissa appear before 1669. A native tradition of roguery gets hold of the publishing market, spurred by local as well as European influence, and the different parts of The English Rogue and other minor examples of criminal fiction see the light from the mid-1660s. Other popular forms like the utopian or imaginary voyage flourish in these early decades, supplying some of the well-known exponents of the period like The Isle of Pines (1668), together with exponents of didacticism and moral allegory like The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), the most widely-read work in the period. Exemplars of nouvelle historiqueand nouvelle galante by La Roche Guilhem, La Roberdière, Catherine Bernard, Sebastien Brémond, Jean de Préchac, Madame d’Aulnoy and Madame de Villedieu, among others, are translated into English, either anonymously, or by hack writers like Peter Bellon and Ferrand Spence.

1685-1700: In this second phase, translations and adaptations from the French nouvelleand the Spanish novelaincrease dramatically. Furthermore, a national adaptation of the tightly-plotted novella will gain precedence, the Restoration novel, and two relevant texts are translated from the French – Guilleragues’ Lettres Portugaises (1669) and Madame d’Aulnoy’s The Ingenious and Diverting Letters of the Lady—Travels into Spain (1691) –, both of which become influential in later fictional exploits by English writers. Finally, the influence of remarkable authors like Aphra Behn in the late 1680s becomes paramount. Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684-87), Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave (1688), and the short novels included in Histories and Novels (1689) – leave an indelible trace in the dramatic and novelistic production of a number of women writers that Josephine Donovan (1992) has called “the Nineties Generation”: Delarivier Manley, Catharine Trotter, Mary Pix and Mary Davys, among them.

A comprehensive analysis of the origins of the novel in English is essential to understand the expansion of the genre in the eighteenth-century. This analysis will illuminate the transnational beginnings of this form, and the subsequent consolidation of a national tradition of the novel in English.

Among its main aims, this project includes the creation of an open-access online database which will be useful for students and academics of the early novel.

One part of the project will be devoted to the publication of selected critical editions of prose fiction texts that have been largely neglected by criticism in an attempt to bring to light part of the hidden tradition of the early English novel.