The Cambridge history of the English novel
By: edited by Robert L. Caserio and Clement Hawes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 958
ISBN-13: 9780521194952
Subjects: History and criticism; LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; English fiction
Description: "The Cambridge History of the English Novel chronicles an ever-changing and developing body of fiction across three centuries. An interwoven narrative of the novel's progress unfolds in more than fifty chapters, charting continuities and innovations of structure, tracing lines of influence in terms of themes and techniques, and showing how greater and lesser authors shape the genre. Pushing beyond the usual period-centered boundaries, the History's emphasis on form reveals the range and depth the novel has achieved in English. This book will be indispensable for research libraries and scholars, but is accessibly written for students. Authoritative, bold and clear, the History raises multiple useful questions for future visions of the invention and re-invention of the novel"--

"Some important English novels have been popular; some have not; but ours is not a history of bestsellers. To be sure, the novel is not an entirely autonomous literary form, developing in isolation from the influence of market forces or of politics, national or international. Far from it: no one could seriously make such an argument. And yet if the novel sees at all - if it offers unique insights - it does so above all through the ceaseless making, breaking, and remaking of literary forms. Every decision that a novelist makes is formally mediated, and thinking through those decisions provides access to the history of the novel as such. By attending to this history of formal innovations one begins to understand the range and depth of which the English novel has been capable. We hope, even though the Cambridge History concludes by affirming the enduring power of romance, that our way of turning the novel's progress into history is less quixotic than the quest of the Knight of the Woeful Countenance"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Introduction Robert L. Caserio and Clement C. Hawes; title: 1. The novel before 'the novel' John Richetti; title: 2. Biographical form in the novel Alan Downie; title: 3. Legal discourse and novelistic form Eleanor Shevlin; title: 4. Novelistic history Clement Hawes; title: 5. Interiorities Elaine McGirr; title: 6. Samuel Richardson Carol Flynn; title: 7. Domesticity and novel narratives Cynthia Wall; title: 8. Obscenity and the erotics of fiction Tom Keymer; title: 9. Cognitive alternatives to interiority Lisa Zunshine; title: 10. The novel, the British nation, and Britain's four kingdoms Janet Sorensen; title: 11. Money's productivity in narrative fiction Liz Bellamy; title: 12. 'The southern unknown countries': imagining the Pacific in the eighteenth-century novel Robert Markley; title: 13. Editorial fictions: paratexts, fragments, and the novel Barbara Benedict; title: 14. Extraordinary narrators: it-narratives and metafiction Mark Blackwell; title: 15. Romance redivivus Scott Black; title: 16. Gothic success and gothic failure: formal innovation in a much-maligned genre George Haggerty; title: 17. Sir Walter Scott: historiography contested by fiction Murray Pittock; title: 18. How and where we live now: Edgeworth, Austen, Dickens, and Trollope Barry Weller; title: 19. From Wollstonecraft to Gissing and Hardy: the revolutionary emergence of women, children, and labor in novelistic narrative Carolyn Lesjak; title: 20. Space and places (I): the four nations Deborah Epstein Nord; title: 21. Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell: politics and its limits Amanda Anderson; title: 22. Populations: pictures of prose in Hardy, Austen, Eliot, and Thackeray Aaron Fogel; title: 23. The novel amid new sciences Phillip Mallett; title: 24. George Eliot's past and present: emblematic histories Barry V. Qualls; title: 25. The Bildungsroman Brigid Lowe; title: 26. The novel and social cognition: internalist and externalist perspective Alan Palmer; title: 27. Clamors of eros Richard A. Kaye; title: 28. The novel as immoral, antisocial force Christopher Lane; title: 29. Sensations: gothic, horror, crime fiction, detective fiction Peter K. Garrett; title: 30. Realism and romance Francis O'Gorman; title: 31. Representations of spaces and places (II): around the globe David James; title: 32. Imperial romance Robert L. Caserio; title: 33. The art novel: impressionists and aesthetes Jesse Matz; title: 34. The impact of lyric, drama, and verse narrative on novel form Stefanie Markovits; title: 35. Henry James and Joseph Conrad: the pursuit of autonomy Robert Hampson; title: 36. Joyce: the modernist novel's revolution in matter and manner Derek Attridge; title: 37. Richardson, Woolf, Lawrence: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (I) Mark Wollaeger; title: 38. Wells, Forster, Firbank, Lewis, Huxley, Compton-Burnett, Green: the modernist novel's experiments with narrative (II) Jonathan Greenberg; title: 39. Beyond autonomy: political dimensions of modernist novels Morag Shiach; title: 40. Fiction by women: continuities and changes, 1930-1990 Elizabeth Maslen; title: 41. The novel amidst other discourses Patricia Waugh; title: 42. The novel and thirty years of war Marina MacKay; title: 43. Thrillers Allan Hepburn; title: 44. Novelistic complications of spaces and places: the four nations and regionalism Dominic Head; title: 45. The series novel: a dominant form Suzanne Keen; title: 46. The novel's West Indian revolution Peter Kalliney; title: 47. Post-war renewals of experiment, 1945-1979 Philip Tew; title: 48. The novel amidst new technology and media Julian Murphet; title: 49. Novels of same-sex desire Gregory Woods; title: 50. From Wells to John Berger: the social democratic era of the novel Charles Ferrall; title: 51. The postcolonial novel: history and memory C. L. Innes; title: 52. History and heritage: the English novel's persistent historiographical turn Peter Childs; title: 53. Twentieth-century satire: the poetics and politics of negativity James F. English; title: 54. Unending romance: science fiction and fantasy in the twentieth century Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn; title: Bibliography; title: Index.