Abstract
What is a novel? How can we define, let alone write the history of, a genre sometimes said to be characterised by its unbounded plasticity? Can we plot the novel’s rise and predict its fall, or does any attempt at historical explanation require (as one writer has mockingly suggested) ‘the combined talents of a Linnaeus and a Procrustes’?1
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Notes and references
C. T. Probyn (1987) English Fiction of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789 (London and New York: Longman), p. x.
See C. Guillén (1971) Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
See G. Day (1987) From Fiction to the Novel (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul), esp. pp. 27–9.
W. Raleigh (1911) The English Novel: A Short Sketch of its History from the Earliest Times to the Appearance of ‘Waverley’, 5th edn (London: John Murray), p. 283.
F. R. Leavis (1948) The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus), pp. 2–3.
I. Watt (1963) The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 308.
See Watt (2000) ‘Flat-Footed and Fly-Blown: the Realities of Realism’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 12:2–3, 149–66 (p. 151).
J. Sutherland (2000) ‘Introduction’, in Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Pimlico), p. xi.
R. D. Altick (1957) The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), pp. 62–3.
Other key works of feminist literary history that focus on the novel include Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977);
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979);
Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel: 100 good women writers before Jane Austen (London: Pandora, 1986).
A more recent example is Josephine Donovan’s Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726 (New York: St Martin’s, 2000).
D. Lynch and W. B. Warner (1996) ‘Introduction: The Transport of the Novel’, in Cultural Institutions of the Novel (Durham and London: Duke University Press), p. 2.
L. Price (2000) The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: from Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 7.
F. Moretti (2006) The Novel, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. i.
Watt, The Rise of the Novel, p. 34. On English-speaking critics’ parochialism see M. A. Doody (1997) The True Story of the Novel (London: HarperCollins), p. 2.
R. Chase (1980) The American Novel and Its Tradition (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. viii.
L. Fiedler (1970) Love and Death in the American Novel (London: Paladin), p. 23.
On this point see also H. Brown (1996) ‘Prologue: Why the Story of the Origin of the (English) Novel Is an American Romance (If Not the Great American Novel)’, in Cultural Institutions of the Novel, 11–43, pp. 30–2.
Benedict Anderson (1983) Imagined Communities (London and New York: Verso), p. 30.
F. Moretti (1998) Atlas of the European Novel1800–1900 (London and New York: Verso), p. 20.
F. Moretti (2000) ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1, 54–68 (p. 60).
K. S. Ramamurti (1987) Rise of the Indian Novel in English (London: Oriental University Press), p. 33.
E. Obiechina (1975) Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 8.
E. Said (1993) Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus), p. xii.
F. Azim (1993) The Colonial Rise of the Novel (London: Routledge), p. 15.
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© 2014 Patrick Parrinder, Andrew Nash and Nicola Wilson
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Parrinder, P., Nash, A., Wilson, N. (2014). Introduction. In: Parrinder, P., Nash, A., Wilson, N. (eds) New Directions in the History of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026989_1
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