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  • English and British Fiction 1750–1820 (vol. 2, The Oxford History of the Novel in English) ed. by Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien
  • Marta Kvande (bio)
English and British Fiction 1750–1820 (vol. 2, The Oxford History of the Novel in English), ed. Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 700pp. £95. ISBN 978-0-19-957480-3.

This volume in The Oxford History of the Novel in English series (OHNE) occupies a particular niche in the market for collections of essays on the novel. The large size and scope separate it from brief collections intended primarily for students, such as the Cambridge Companion series. With thirty-three essays packed into 630 pages, this collection aims for both greater breadth and greater depth. The Cambridge History of the English Novel is more comparable in size, but that book allots a single volume to the history that the OHNE plans to survey in twelve volumes, and of which the present volume is only a part. Blackwell’s Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture covers a similar time span, but as a “companion,” it has different aims than a volume explicitly titled a “history.” Not many books on the market, then, attempt to do what this series and this volume aim to do: provide a comprehensive history of the novel in English that offers both breadth of coverage and depth of study. In market terms, this volume creates a place for itself by staking out territory different from other available books.

The volume offers something new and valuable in terms of its content as well. Like all the other OHNE volumes so far, it includes a group of essays attending to the processes of production and distribution. These essays focus on central issues in book history for the eighteenth century—production, authorship, and circulation—topics that are crucial for understanding the material and therefore the literary context of the novel during this period. The basic historical facts of book production help us to understand what readers physically encountered when they read novels. And the transformations in authorship (trends in named authorship and anonymity as well as what it meant to be an “author”) and in circulation (the emergence of circulating and subscription libraries) had enormous effects on the history of the novel. Each essay provides both an overview of the topic and new insights. James Raven’s essay on “Production” notes, for example, that during the 1780s, many novels claimed the influence of Frances Burney—far more than named Henry [End Page 103] Fielding or Tobias Smollett as models. And because the volume opens with this section, this group of essays helps to ensure a productive awareness of the materiality of texts throughout the essays that follow. In E.J. Clery’s essay on “The Novel in the 1750s,” for instance, the discussion of the genre in that decade includes consideration of the state of the book trades and the marketplace for books, including the emergence of reviewing as a force and the importance of reprints of earlier fiction. Making such awareness part of the analysis of the kinds of novels written and published in the 1750s creates a fuller picture and a deeper understanding of it. In a similar way, the section devoted to “Alternative Forms of Fiction” includes essays that draw attention to different publishing formats and how they shaped both what authors wrote and what readers looked for. This kind of deeper understanding through awareness of the novel’s materiality is one of the volume’s strengths.

This particular OHNE volume faces (as volume 1 will, when it is published) the special challenge of dealing with a period in the novel’s history that has often been considered to include its “rise.” Histories of the eighteenth-century British novel have nearly always sought to explain how and why the novel transformed itself over the course of the century, and, as a result, these histories nearly always end up offering a teleological and selective account. This collection employs several strategies to avoid such a problem. One benefit of the focus of this volume on the years 1750–1820 is that it...

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