The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 3: The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820–1880 ed. by John Kucich, Jenny Bourne Taylor (review)

This significant book is part of a truly ambitious series that, its general editor Patrick Parrinder tells us, offers “a comprehensive, worldwide history of English-language prose fiction” (xv). The editors of this volume have brought together chapters on the writers, texts, and contexts central to scholarship on Victorian fiction. But Jenny Bourne Taylor and John Kucich have also opened out the definition of the novel to include short works of fiction, highlighted the reader alongside the author, and set the British novel in an international as well as an imperial context.

Importantly, the volume focuses on the nineteenth-century, rather than the Victorian, novel. Reaching back to the 1820s allows Bourne Taylor and Kucich to locate Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821) as the inaugurator of the three-volume novel but also to see Scott and his early-century contemporaries as pioneers in the professionalization of authorship, empowered rather than overwhelmed by expansions in the publishing industry and in literacy. This approach differentiates this work from a previous Oxford History of English Literature volume on the Victorian novel by Alan Horsman (1991), which began with the Great Reform Act in 1832, although it too finishes in 1880, agreeing that this point marked the end of the novel’s cultural centrality and ushered in aesthetic and material changes. The decision to end the volume in 1880, well justified as it is, sets this volume in contrast to other recent histories, such as James Eli Adams’s A History of Victorian Literature (2009) in the Blackwell History of Literature series and Kate Flint’s The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature (2012), both of which escort their reader into the fin de siècle.

The volume is not structured chronologically but opens with the section “Novelists, Readers, and the Fiction Industry,” in which Joanne Shattock, Deborah Wynne, and Graham Law examine publishers, readers, and authors to provide an outline of the expanding and shifting nature of the fiction industry in this period. This section is followed by eight chapters providing histories of a variety of subgenres, from the Newgate novel to the silver fork novel. Interesting conversations are set up, for example, between the domestic and the sensation novel, with Nancy Armstrong suggesting that sensation “assaulted all that domestic realism stood for” (138) and Susan Fraiman concluding that the domestic novel itself is drawn to the domestic as a “particularly rich site for exploring gender and its discontents” (184). These, and others of the subgenres in this section, come across as interconnected rather than antagonistic. As one might expect, Dickens is a frequent touch-stone, and Lyn Pykett’s chapter “Charles Dickens: The Novelist as a Public Figure” provides a wider context for these references. This chapter, along with those on the Brontës, by John Bowen, and on George Eliot, by Dinah Birch, form a short but dynamic section entitled “Major Authors in Context.”

A section of five chapters is devoted to the significance of place in relation to the novel. James Buzard’s “Nationalism and National Identities” follows on neatly from Elaine Freedgood’s contention in her chapter, “The Novel and Empire,” that the novel “colonizes our imaginations” (391). Josephine McDonagh’s chapter traces the trajectories of the regional novel, and Walter Scott again provides a historiographical starting place as well as a cultural stimulus for later writers like George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, whose sense of provincial space was vital to their understanding of realism. The final section of the book, “Contemporary Contexts,” explores the novel’s engagement with a variety of topics, including radicalism, the state, science, religion, psychology, and gender. The writers of these sections work hard to offer detailed and meaningful historical contextualization that might function both to introduce students to such contexts and to spark new questions about the relationships among them...