The thirty literary historians assembled here have
had their work cut out in a very different way. Let them be short, outwardly
plain yet unexpectedly attractive and memorable, fiercely self-contained and
independent yet magnetically engaging. The contributors to this volume – the
third in The Oxford History of the Novel in English – must sometimes have
felt like Charlotte Brontë or Thackeray sketching governesses in 1847. Add
to this the requirement to offer the comprehensiveness of an encyclopedia
and the accessibility of an introduction, to be descriptive and yet summary,
to be current but never merely modish, and perhaps the most ascetic
discipline of all, to do without footnotes: this must have been a bracing
regime, to say the least. Depriving a literary critic of footnotes today is
like forbidding a novelist dialogue. Argument, allegiances, manners good and
bad, changes of pace and rhythm – many of the rituals of academic
sociability – are withheld. That these scholars, leaders all in their field,
have accepted such constraints with good grace, and harnessed their
expertise to such remarkable effect, is testimony to editorial powers of
considerable magnitude. With chapters on book history, on all the important
sub-genres, on strategies of narration and voice, on national and
international contexts and concerns, on key thematics such as science,
politics, gender and religion, as well as individual pieces on the Brontës,
Dickens and Eliot, the volumefs coverage is magisterial, and if it doesnft
mention wax coral, it does have useful things to say about every significant
novel from Adam Bede to Zoë.
... Individually, the essays are jewels of compression and clarity. The late Richard Maxwellfs survey of the historical novel, for example, manages, in a few short pages, to suggest the debt owed to Scottish historiographical precedents by both English and French practitioners, and to map out fictional versions of a variety of national pasts as they surface in tales of crime, books for children, urban Gothic and religious fiction (both pro- and anti-Catholic), while taking in every significant historical novelist – which is to say almost every important novelist and a great many hacks – from Walter Scott to Thomas Hardy. Nicolas Damesfs elegant analysis of Victorian theories of realism, while accepting that much nineteenth-century criticism is explicitly anti-theoretical, shows, by way of contemporaneous science, cultural politics, European philosophy, art history and British literary practice, how the novel and its critics negotiated their way through questions of reading and form, and towards a tentative account of mimesis. The need for self-containment means that factors common to the evolution of most genres and careers – the impact of new technologies, the dominance of the circulating libraries and the expensive Walter Scott-style three-decker format, the shaping force of serialization, the interpenetration of fiction and journalism, the proliferation of new genres and audiences resulting from widening literacy and the repeal of the gtaxes on knowledgeh – reappear several times, despite being crisply laid out in introductory chapters by the editors, as well as by Joanne Shattock, Deborah Wynne and Graham Law in their admirable surveys of gThe Publishing Industryh, gReaders and Reading Practicesh, and gThe Professionalization of Authorshiph. Trev Broughton, University of York 'Art and Craft in the Novel', Times Literary Supplement (28 March 2012) |