"In our current generation of sometimes manufactured criticism, Family Fictions is a refreshing book because Flint, though mindful of the demands of institutional analysis, has not lost touch with the simple pleasures that stories produce, which, I think, is pretty rare in academic writing. One of the many rewards of that engagement is an excellent series of observations that frequently pop up in his book to synthesize and clarify otherwise complex textual and narrative relationships . . . .Family Fictions adds appreciably to our understanding of what the period family meant, as well as the role the novel played in the slippery history of the family."--The Age of Johnson"Flint's book is well written and complex; he is convincing in his argument that the development of the early novel is not separable from the novel's fascination with the family."--Eighteenth-Century Life

Introduction; 1. Toward an eighteenth-century anthropology; 2. From family romance to domestic scandal: 'female arts' in The Fair Jilt; 3. Robinson Crusoe and the orphaned family; 4. The anxiety of affluence: Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded; 5. The erotic and the domestic in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless; 6. Disavowing kinship, 1760-1798; Afterword; Notes; Index.