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  • Nation & Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day
  • Judith Wilt (bio)
Nation & Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day, by Patrick Parrinder; pp. 502. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, £25.00, $45.00.

Patrick Parrinder's Nation & Novel is a welcome work of synthesis on a topic of great current interest. Choosing "nation" as his lens on the English novel, Parrinder enters robustly into the critical elaboration of origins pioneered by Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, and Benedict Anderson. He simultaneously enters into the third millennial cultural debate about ends structured by Francis Fukuyama and Niall Ferguson, and by writers from Virginia Woolf to John Updike, who have been prophesying the disappearance of the novel into journalism and memoir.

Parrinder tells a story still inflected by progressivist arcs: nation's big bang in the Shakespearean imaginary, novel's big bang in the management of a post-Puritan Commonwealth national self. But the rhythm of his lively 400 pages (plus a wealth of notes, author biographies, and exceptionally useful "further reading" suggestions) is a steady-state dub. From Deloney and Defoe to Zangwill and Zadie Smith, allegories of endogamous and exogamous marriages explore the national territories of reform and hybridity, quests reflect cycles of provincialist and cosmopolitanist versions of patriotism, the nation represents itself as benevolent robber, suffering heroine, sorcerer's apprentice, or apprentice marrying the master's daughter. And the ghost rider in the national novel, as in the novel nation, is Arthur, once and future king defining England's indefiniteness back toward the Celtic and Roman past, and forward into the future of The Rainbow, magical or multicultural.

For Parrinder, prose fiction in English most forcibly strikes the national chord in 1485 when Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur deliberately shifted the Round Table from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Tintagel to Plantagenet Westminster, while his printer William Caxton, to explain why those French frivolities are really a serious reflection on Englishness, created with his internal divisions and his careful prefaces and introductions the "editorial" gaze in which Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and especially Henry Fielding would fix the stories told in the modern novel. Myth became history, the victorious Henry Tudor named his son Arthur, and several generations of royal historians did a similar conversion of the French/Welsh-born monarch into a national royal line.

Early Modern writers folded the classical legitimacy of history and epic into the upstart genre of prose fiction. And when the Modernists tired of the solemn sciences of [End Page 505] moral enlargement editorialized in the fictions of the eminent Victorians, the Arthurian cycle seemed like the future again—the sagas of John Galsworthy, Ford Madox Ford, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, and C. P. Snow; Woolf's sly invocation of Percival and Iris Murdoch's of the Green Knight—all holding both elegy and prophesy in their irony, an eternal return summoned from once and future by the even newer sciences of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and James Frazier. It is a story well told by a critic already notable for his interest in H. G. Wells and other visions of future history.

Reading Parrinder, Victorianists are likely to notice that to train the lens of nation upon the nineteenth-century novel finds the latter falling short of the facts of English multiplicity and the dream of national maturity. In this view, whatever exogamous adventures of spirit occur in the middles of novels, or whatever hard truths of class, gender, commodity economics, or imperial politics are recognized, in the end heroes and heroines of novels by authors from Walter Scott and Jane Austen to Benjamin Disraeli and George Eliot marry their psycho-genetic cousins, and the potentially enabling fiction of a two-nation England is quickly swept away in the insistent presentation of a hidden (and Tory) unity. A built-in "prematurity" consoles the educating leisure of the reading bourgeoisie and gentry of an England proud to have grown up first and most carefully into the complexities of democracy and empire. But this means we never know whether Emma Woodhouse and her elderly Knightley run into difficulties, let alone whether a...

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