Synopses & Reviews
The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a 12-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the 'literary' novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and tendencies.
Volume 3, The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820-1800 charts one of the most significant and exciting periods in the history of the genre. Beginning with the decade in which Scott's work helped inaugurate the three-volume novel, and in which many narrative genres, conventions, and preoccupations associated with Victorian fiction first emerged, it traces how these forms developed and changed in the mid nineteenth century, as the novel became established at the centre of British national culture. The volume includes sections on book history, on major authors, and on the varieties of fiction and range of narrative modes during the period. It also features essays on theories of the novel, and on the novel's relationship to other aesthetic forms. Volume 3 also emphasizes the wider cultural role and significance of the novel during the period, including its impact on ideas of place and nation, as well as its intervention in political, scientific, and intellectual contexts.
Review
"This literary history offers multiple points of entry and multiple connections...It succeeds particularly well thanks to editors who clearly know when to intervene and when to let their contributors go where they will." --Review 19
"Essential." --Choice
"An invaluable addition to [Oxford's] History of the Novel in English series... [An] important new resource." --Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century
About the Author
John Kucich is a Professor of English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He has written numerous books and essays on nineteenth-century literature and culture. His publications include
Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Georgia, 1981),
Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (California, 1987),
The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Cornell, 1994), and
Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Princeton, 2007). He has also edited, with Dianne F. Sadoff,
Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (Minnesota, 2000).
Jenny Bourne Taylor is a Professor of English at the University of Sussex. She has written widely on nineteenth-century literature and culture. Her publication include (with Sally Shuttleworth) Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts (Clarendon, 1998), and ed., with Margot Finn and Michael Lobban Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Law, Literature and History (Palgrave, 2010).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
General Editor's Preface
Introduction
Editorial Note
Note on British Currency before Decimalization
Part I: Novelists, Readers, and the Fiction Industry
1. The Publishing Industry, Joanne Shattock
2. Readers and Reading Practices, Deborah Wynne
3. The Professionalization of Authorship, Graham Law
Part II: Varieties and Genres
4. The Historical Novel, Richard Maxwell
5. Gothic Fictions in the Nineteenth Century, Deborah Lutz
6. The English Bildungsroman, Richard Salmon
7. The Silver Fork Novel, Dianne F. Sadoff
8. The Newgate Novel, Heather Worthington
9. The Sensation Novel, Nancy Armstrong
10. Children's Fiction, Claudia Nelson
11. The Domestic Novel, Susan Fraiman
Part III: Major Authors in Context
12. Charles Dickens: The Novelist as Public Figure, Lyn Pykett
13. The Brontes and the Transformations of Romanticism, John Bowen
14. George Eliot and Intellectual Culture, Dinah Birch
Part IV: Narrative Structures and Strategies
15. Short Fiction and the Novel, Jenny Bourne Taylor
16. Multiple Narrators and Multiple Plots, Jenny Bourne Taylor and John Kucich
17. Addressing the Reader: The Autobiographical Voice, Rachel Ablow
18. Realism and Theories of the Novel, Nicholas Dames
19. Theatricality and the Novel, David Kurnick
20. Aesthetic Theories, Lucy Hartley
Part V: The Nation and its Boundaries
21. Modernization and the Organic Society, John Kucich
22. Place, Region, and Migration, Josephine McDonagh
23. The Novel and Empire, Elaine Freedgood
24. Nationalism and National Identities, James Buzzard
25. International Influences, Margaret Cohen
Part VI: Contemporary Contexts
26. Radicalism and Reform, Ella Dzelzanis
27. Parliament and the State, Lauren Goodlad
28. Science and the Novel, Cannon Schmitt
29. Religion and the Novel, Norman Vance
30. Psychology and the Idea of Character, Michael Davis
31. Gender Identities and Relationships, Cora Kaplan
Bibliography