The Columbia History of the British Novel

by John J. Richetti (Editor)

What do Pamela, Shamela, and Evelina have in common? Who is Coningsby? Where is The Moonstone? When does one need A Room of One's Own? Why is it that Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit? And just how good is the British novel?
These are just a few of the questions answered in The Columbia History of the British Novel. John Richetti's comprehensive history takes us from the birth of the novel in the eighteenth century through its social and culture-conscious growing pains in the nineteenth century to its angst-ridden maturity in the twentieth century. Concise, cohesive, and complementary to any collection of must-read classics, The Columbia History of the British Novel challenges and enlightens us by examining canonical writers as well as women and postcolonial novelists.
Discover the origins of the novel in the "scandalous" books of Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Delarivier Manley and follow its development through Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne against the backdrop of the novel's meteoric rise in the 1700s. Follow Frances Burney and the rise of the woman novelist, and the gothic novel as invented by Horace Walpole and perfected by Mary Shelley and Matthew Lewis. Remember remarkable reunions in Jane Austen; the bond between chivalry, Waverley, and Sir Walter Scott; the Brontes, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and the tradition of Romantic women's fiction; Charles Dickens and the professionalization of literature; George Eliot and the novel of ideas; and Wilkie Collins and the sensation mania of the 1860s. Continue through the nineteenth century with the "Condition of England" novels of Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell, Hardy's tales of class and sexual difference, and Anglo-Indian perspectives on the empire from Rudyard Kipling and Philip Meadows Taylor.
Enter the twentieth century and examine the modern novel with Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Then trace the anti-modernist movement with Kingsley Amis, C. P. Snow, and Angus Wilson and, finally, keep up with contemporaries - Doris Lessing, A. S. Byatt, Anita Brookner, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Jeanette Winterson.
The Columbia History of the British Novel lets us do all these things as it presents literary Toni Bowers on early amatory fiction; James Thompson on Jane Austen; Ina Ferris on William Thackeray; David Trotter on Arnold Bennett, George Moore, and George Gissing; Michael Gorra on colonial and postcolonial novels from Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie; Michael Seidel on James Joyce; and Carol McGuirk on postwar feminisms from Margaret Drabble to Angela Carter.
The Columbia History of the British Novel examines classics in light of the critical theories of Bakhtin, Lukacs, and Foucault, among others, as well as a panoply of such subgenres as picaresque fiction, adventures, travelogues, utopian and dystopian prose, historical romances, detective novels, sentimental novels, and the Bildungsroman. This superb history also includes brief biographies of novelists discussed and lists of further reading.

1064 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 1994

Reviews

[Paul Bryant]

This is just a note about the utterly bizarre world of book-buying we now inhabit.

This vast scholarly history of the British novel is 1086 pages long and it weighs a lot. I thought I might find a 2nd hand copy for £10 on (British) Amazon, that would seem reasonable. So I looked. And I saw

Amazon sell NEW copies for £83 ($118)
But on Amazon Marketplace other retailers are selling NEW copies for £21 ($30)
But....................................
other people are selling second-hand copies for 46 pence !!!!!!!!!!!!!! (66 cents)
What?
Can that be really real?
Yes, it can - my 46 pence plus £2.80 = £3.26 ($4.65) copy has arrived.
Now : posting this vast tome from one part of the UK to another would cost a normal person over £10 ($14) easily.

So - I don't get it.

But I like it.

[Liz]

I bought this book in 2007 for my undergraduate research on Wilkie Collins. I've used it since then as a follow-up to research or course discussions. It holds a large variety of interesting essays on the British novel - with each essay focused on a single author whose works are seminal to the British canon.

Ronald R. Thomas, "Wilkie Collins and the Sensation Novel" - For my MA research

George E. Haggerty, "The Gothic Novel, 1764-1824" - For my Gothic presentation