English and British Fiction 1750–1820 ed. by Peter Garside, Karen O’Brien (review)

‘While we aim to offer a comprehensive account of the Anglophone novel,’ Patrick Parrinder writes in the ‘General Editor’s Preface’ to The Oxford History of the Novel in English as a whole, ‘our coverage cannot of course be exhaustive; that is a task for the bibliographer rather than the literary historian’ (p. xv). However, one of the most rewarding aspects of this second volume is its contributors’ thoughtful engagement with the works that Stephen Colclough, in an excellent chapter on readers, calls ‘the new bibliographies of fiction’ (p. 552). Particularly evident is the influence of the two volumes of Peter Garside, James Raven and Rainer Schöwerling’s The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles (2000) and its online supplements, which can be seen to have contributed to a vast expansion of the range of novels in the frame for scholarly consideration. While by no means all of the 3,367 novels that Raven’s opening chapter records as being first published in Britain between 1750 and 1819 receive a mention, the range of different works covered in this volume is extremely impressive. The index records references to fiction by over 220 different late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authors, as well as to numerous anonymous works.

In his afterword, Clifford Siskin argues for seeing the history of the novel in the eighteenth century as a complex process of emergence rather than a triumphal rise. The contributors to this volume do justice to that complexity through a combination of wide-ranging interests, well-chosen foci and thoughtful and lucid analysis. As a whole, the book does an exemplary job of examining the multifarious historical, social, and cultural contexts which informed the creations of novels and genres in the period that it covers. The editors, Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien, have obviously thought long and hard about what is desirable in a volume seeking to give both an introduction to and a full and current account of the field, and their efforts have resulted in a book that deserves to be a widely-consulted standard work.

While accounting for the excellences of this book’s individual chapters would take vastly more space than this review allows, a brief survey of the six major part divisions within the book should serve to give a fair impression of its approaches. The first part, ‘Book Production and Distribution’, features the aforementioned essay by Raven on production; a fluent and interesting essay by Garside on authorship; and a clear-eyed account of lending and circulation by David Allan. Beginning with these book-historical perspectives puts the material text front and centre, making it clear that understanding the natures of markets and readerships is crucial for understanding the social and cultural roles of fiction in this period.

The second part—and by far the longest—covers ‘Major Authors and Traditions’. Despite this title, a focus on traditions predominates. Only three writers—Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, and Walter Scott—are unambiguously assigned chapters of their own. Most of the contributors in this section concentrate instead on groupings of texts located in relatively specific historical moments. The nuanced comparative readings that they conduct make clear the flexibility and range of the genres that authors in the period could dabble with or plunge into. Jon Mee, for example, writes revealingly about the ways in which Revolutionary conflicts were played out and echoed in Jacobin and anti-Jacobin fictions, while Deidre Lynch assesses the experimental aesthetics of early Gothic novels. More obscure movements are also given space in chapters such as Anthony Mandal’s consideration of the ways in which the evangelical novels of the early nineteenth century sought to ‘reshape the troubled topography of fiction’ (p. 272). A few chapters tend towards description and plot summary, but in all...