New Directions in the History of the Novel

by Parrinder, Patrick; Nash, Andrew; Wilson, Nicola

• ISBN13: 9781137026972
• ISBN10: 1137026979
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-03-07
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

What exactly, and when, was the 'rise' of the novel? Is its dominance now over? How have material conditions, habits of reading, and authors' reactions to the changing international marketplace helped to shape the novel as a form? In a series of studies of British, American and postcolonial fiction from the 17th to the 21st century, New Directions in the History of the Novel challenges conventional accounts and sets out new areas for teaching and research. It includes separate sections on 'The Material Text', 'Questions of Realism and Form', 'The Novel in National and Transnational Cultures', and 'The Novel Now'. With contributions from leading scholars of the novel, this stimulating collection is required reading for teachers and students of the novel and its history.

Author Biography

Patrick Parrinder is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Reading, UK.

Nicola Wilson is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Reading, UK.

Andrew Nash is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Reading, UK.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Contributors
1. Introduction
PART I: THE MATERIAL TEXT
2. Novel Designs: Manipulating the Page in English Fiction, 1660-1780; Thomas Keymer
3. Textual Instability and the Contemporary Novel: Reading Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing On and Off the Page; Andrew Nash
4. The Early American Novel in Fragments: Writing and Reading Serial Fiction in the Post-Revolutionary United States; Matthew Pethers
5. Archive Fever: The Publishers' Archive and the History of the Novel; Nicola Wilson
PART II: LITERARY HISTORIES: QUESTIONS OF REALISM AND FORM
6. Memory, Interiority and Historicity: Some Factors in the Early Novel; Patrick Parrinder
7. A Gothic History of the British Novel; Nancy Armstrong
8. Critical Histories of Omniscience; Rachel Sagner Buurma
9. The 'power of the written word': Literary Impressionism, Politics and Anxiety; Max Saunders
10. Virginia Woolf and Metonymic Realism: Making It New?; Pam Morris
PART III: THE NOVEL IN NATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL CULTURES
11. Defining an 'Age of the Novel' in the United States; Jonathan Arac
12. Between Modernism and the Postcolonial: Reading Patrick White and Malcolm Lowry in the 1970s; Mark Williams
13. Transporting Fiction: The Novel in a (Post)Colonial World; Simon Gikandi
PART IV: THE NOVEL NOW
14. Art Unseduced by Its Own Beauty: Toni Morrison and the Humility of Experiment; David James
15. The Dynamics of Residual and Emergent in the American Novel after 1940; Cyrus R. K. Patell and Deborah Lindsay Williams