Between the emergence of the realist novel in the early eighteenth century and the novel's subsequent alignment with self-improvement a century later lies a significant moment when novelistic characters were unlikely to mature in any meaningful way. That adolescent protagonists poised on the cusp of adulthood resisted a headlong tumble into maturity through the workings of plot reveals a curious literary and philosophical counter-tradition in the history of the novel. Stephanie Insley Hershinow's Born Yesterday shows how the archetype of the early realist novice reveals literary character tout court.

Through new readings of canonical novels by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, Hershinow severs the too-easy tie between novelistic form and character formation, a conflation, she argues, of Bild with Bildung. A pop-culture-infused epilogue illustrates the influence of the eighteenth-century novice, as embodied by Austen's Emma, in the 1995 film Clueless, as well as in dystopian YA works like The Hunger Games.

Drawing on bold close readings, Born Yesterday alters the landscape of literary historical eighteenth-century studies and challenges some of novel theory's most well-worn assumptions.

"Hershinow makes a compelling claim that the character of the novice represents a high point in the art of the novel. What makes her argument compelling is how she inhabits the novels at the level of the sentence, taking her vocabulary from the novelists."--Critical Inquiry

"Ultimately, to read this book was to confirm my suspicion that the best close readers are the best writers of literary criticism. The good reader takes pleasure in nuance and complexity; the good writer tends to repeat the qualities that inspired that pleasure. Hershinow's readings, in other words, are filled with the insights of discerning study; her prose is filled with wit and humor, always intellectually serious but also gracefully playful in a way uncommon in academic writing . . . Brimming with possibility--both as a whole and even at the level of the sentence--this book embodies the spirit of the vibrant characters it studies."--LA Review of Books