Outline the changes in technology and society which led to an increase in the readers of the novel in the eighteenth century Europe.
The changes in technology and society:
(i)Technological improvements in printing brought down the price of books and innovations in marketing led to expanded sales.
(ii)In the nineteenth century, Europe entered the industrial age. Factories came up, business profits increased and the economy grew.
(iii)The growth of industry was accompanied by an economic philosophy which celebrated the pursuit of profit and undervalued the lives of workers.
(iv)The vast majority of readers of the novel lived in the city. The novel created in them a feeling of connection with the fate of rural communities.
(v)The novel uses the vernacular, the language that is spoken by common people. By coming closer to the different spoken languages of the people, the novel produces the sense of a shared world between diverse people in a nation
Social changes in Britain which led to an increase in women readers.
What actions of Robinson Crusoe make us see him as a typical coloniser?
After 1740, the readership of novels began to include poorer people.
Novelists in colonial India wrote for a political cause.
