| 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
volume's coverage is magisterial, and if it doesn't
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 Maxwell's 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 Dames's 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 "taxes on knowledge" – 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 "The Publishing Industry", "Readers and Reading Practices", and "The Professionalization of Authorship". Trev Broughton, University of York 'Art and Craft in the Novel', Times Literary Supplement (28 March 2012) |