The History of the Novel Writ Large—and New

The History of the Novel Writ Large—and NewJerry C. Beasley The Columbia History of the British Novel, edited by John Richetti with (as his associates) John Bender, Deirdre David, and Michael Seidel (Columbia University Press, 1994) is a massively ambitious book that represents the first attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the British novel in more than thirty years, since the publication of Lionel Stevenson's The English Novel: A Panorama in I960. Stevenson's work concluded a period of great activity by historians of the novel, beginning with Ernest Baker's ten-volume chronicle (1924-39) and continuing through Edward Wagenknecht's Cavalcade ofthe English Novel (1943), Arnold Kettle's Introduction to the English Novel (1951), and Walter Allen's readable The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954). These works, to a greater (Baker) or lesser (Allen) extent, pursued essentially the same purpose: to provide a detailed linear record of the development of English fiction and to trace its evolutionary progress from primitive beginnings to twentieth-century sophistication. They always affirmed the accepted canon, eitiier by omitting anyüiing not widely considered to be part of it (Allen, Wagenknecht) or by alluding to "minor " works and writers only to denounce them as "inferior"—with a moralistic huff of contempt (Baker) or a word of cool academic dismissal (Stevenson). The prevailing attitude defined by this collectively generated version of the novel's history was encouraged and compounded by the mid-century pieties of New Criticism, with its idealized notions of form (me literary work as "icon"), and—even more—by the arrogant foolishness of F.R. Leavis and his Cambridge crowd of critical dogmatists . When I first read Stevenson, and men Allen and Leavis, as an EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 8, Number 1, October 1995 74 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION undergraduate English student in the early 1960s, I was pretty sure theirs were the last words I would ever need to know on their subject. I was wrong, of course; but men so were the teachers who persuaded me to believe such a thing, and so was the conventional wisdom they were repeating. There was no way then really to anticipate what would happen in the next generation to change the way we study the literary past, determine and record its meaningful context, and write its history. What happened is well known—which is a good thing, for it is far too complex to summarize in a review essay like this one. It is enough simply to mention that the 1960s witnessed a sudden burst of new bibliographical research and the eventual unearthing of scores—hundreds, actually—of novels not previously familiar to (much less read by) even the most serious and diligent students of British literature, changing forever the landscape of the novel's history and certainly helping to promote what now seem to have been inevitable challenges to the old canon and to old ways of assessment. These challenges were carried out—are still being carried out—by proponents of the various critical and theoretical "-isms" that began to spring up (or to flourish) in the same decade of the 1960s, or in some cases after: feminism, Marxism, cultural materialism, structuralism, deconstructionism, New Historicism, post-colonialism. The result has been a dizzying—and also exhilarating—proliferation both of texts and of approaches. In retrospect it is not difficult to understand why, since the work of Lionel Stevenson, the history of the novel has been written piecemeal instead of whole—a process that actually began (for the study of early fiction) in the mid-1950s with Kathleen Tillotson's Novels ofthe Eighteen-Forties (1954) and Ian Watt's equally pioneering Rise ofthe Novel (1957) and has since continued unabated in important books by (among many others) John Richetti, Percy Adams, Michael McKeon, J. Paul Hunter, Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Mary Poovey, Patrick Brantlinger, and Michael Gorra. How else could the task be managed? How could it ever again be possible to prepare a comprehensive historical work, one that could accommodate all that is essential in the great new abundance? John Richetti and his associate editors have found a way: assemble a large, talented, and...