A Companion to the English Novel

This collection of authoritative essays represents the latest scholarship on topics relating to the themes, movements, and forms of English fiction, while chronicling its development in Britain from the early 18th century to the present day.

• Comprises cutting-edge research currently being undertaken in the field, incorporating the most salient critical trends and approaches
• Explores the history, evolution, genres, and narrative elements of the English novel
• Considers the advancement of various literary forms – including such genres as realism, romance, Gothic, experimental fiction, and adaptation into film
• Includes coverage of narration, structure, character, and affect; shifts in critical reception to the English novel; and geographies of contemporary English fiction
• Features contributions from a variety of distinguished and high-profile literary scholars, along with emerging younger critics
• Includes a comprehensive scholarly bibliography of critical works on and about the novel to aid further reading and research

Stephen Arata is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. In addition to Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle (1996) and many essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, he is a General Co-Editor of the 38-volume Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson 2014.

Madigan Haley holds a PhD from the Department of English at the University of Virginia, where he is a Postdoctoral Preceptor. A comparatist with a special focus on twentieth- and twenty-first century Anglophone literature, he has published on the global novel in the minnesota review and in Novel: A Forum on Fiction. His current book project explores how contemporary world literature gives form to an ethical notion of the global.

J. Paul Hunter is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor, Emeritus, at the University of Chicago and Professor of English, Emeritus, at the University of Virginia. His publications include Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction [1990], winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Jennifer Wicke is Professor of English at the University of Virginia and former Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author of the forthcoming Born to Shop: Modernism, Modernity, and the Global Work of Consumption. 

Notes on Contributors viii

Preface xiii

Part I The Novel and Its Histories 1

1 The 1740s 3
Patricia Meyer Spacks

2 The 1790s 18
Lynn Festa

3 The 1850s 34
Ivan Kreilkamp

4 The Long 1920s 49
Jennifer Wicke

5 The 2000s 71
Ashley Dawson

Part II The Novel and Its Genres 87

6 Realism and the Eighteenth‐Century Novel 89
John Richetti

7 Romance 103
Laurie Langbauer

8 Gothic 117
John Paul Riquelme

9 Popular and Mass‐Market Fiction 132
Janice Carlisle

10 Experimental Fictions 144
Mark Blackwell

11 The Novel into Film 159
Jonathan Freedman

Part III The Novel in Pieces 175

12 Some Versions of Narration 177
Alison Booth

13 Some Versions of Form 192
Stephen Arata

14 A Character of Character, in Five Metaphors 209
Deidre Lynch

15 Affect in the English Novel 225
Nicholas Daly

Part IV The Novel in Theory 239

16 The Novel in Theory before 1900 241
James Eli Adams

17 The Novel in Theory, 1900–1965 256
Chris Baldick

18 The Novel in Theory after 1965 271
Madigan Haley

Part V The Novel in Circulation 289

19 Making a Living as an Author 291
Deirdre David

20 The Network Novel and How It Unsettled Domestic Fiction 306
Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse

21 Reading Novels, Alone and in Groups 321
Andrew Elfenbein

Part VI Geographies of the Novel 339

22 London 341
Cynthia Wall

23 The Provincial Novel 360
John Plotz

24 Intranationalisms 373
James Buzard

25 Internationalisms and the Geopolitical Aesthetic 387
Lauren M. E. Goodlad

Part VII The Novel, Public and Private 407

26 The Novel and the Everyday 409
Kate Flint

27 The Public Sphere 426
John Marx

28 The Novel and the Nation 441
Christopher GoGwilt

29 World English/World Literature 456
Jonathan Arac

Index 471

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