Bracketing Ephemera: Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins and Eighteenth-Century Book Culture

Abstract

The article seeks to conceive of Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750) as a hybrid text that employs certain (formal) elements of what was to become ‘the realist novel’ as integrative bracketing mechanisms for the text’s more ephemeral as well as fantastical and subversive aspects. To do so, the article builds on recent research on the realist novel which has dragged into the light the intricacies and interdependencies of the seemingly clear-cut categories of formal realism and ephemeral writing. Accordingly, texts such as Peter Wilkins can be treated as sites of exchange or integration between these modes of writing. The article moves from the emerging divide between ‘the novel’ and ephemera in the mid-eighteenth century to Paltock’s frame narrative and to paratextual devices as well as the metaphorical function of flight. By doing so, it will be shown that Paltock’s integrative approach in Peter Wilkins hinges on a deep awareness of the bias between realist and ephemeral/fantastical writing.