A Companion to the English Novel ed. by Stephen Arata, et al. (review)

Aimed at readers who are familiar with the English novel but not necessarily professional critics, A Companion to the English Novel, edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke, provides a variety of overviews for scholars and general readers seeking to explore new fields. The volume includes twenty-nine essays arranged “topically” rather than chronologically, and the editors’ preface announces its goal not to summarize the careers of individual writers or to constitute new canons, but rather to address systems of genres and forms, networks of markets and circulation, new temporalities and geographies, important theoretical takes on the novel, and the novel’s ever-widening publics (xiii). As a volume, then, this handbook seeks to intervene in conventional literary histories; to provide readers alternative, materialist histories of the book; to rethink the notion that genres and subgenres last only a generation; and to theorize the novel’s situatedness in transnational and global geopolitics.

As interventions in literary history, a number of essays cover historical periods not for their representativeness, but instead for the social, historical, and economic situations within which novels appeared. Ivan Kreilkamp, for example, situates the mid-century novel in the 1850s’ “wealth, comfort, and consensus,” while incorporating production details of nineteenth-century serial and multivolume publishing, and the emergence and fall of Mudie’s circulating library (34). Janice Carlisle’s outstanding essay, “Popular and Mass-Market Fiction,” turns away from the canon to examine 1840s novels published serially by Edward Lloyd. Recounting the changing economic conditions and technological innovations, the lowering of taxes on knowledge, new forms of communication and transport, and the rise and expansion of literacy among the working classes, Carlisle traces the emergence of the mass audience for popular fiction. She argues against critical fallacies that either ignore actual readers when assessing a text’s meanings, or read texts as incorporating “presumed characteristics” of its readers, and instead deploys nineteenth-century “material conditions” and “modes of consumption” to characterize working readers’ relations with texts and dedication to a “good read” (136, 141). These wonderful examples of new forays into nineteenth-century modes of publication and periodicity produce fresh material for scholars and general readers alike.

A number of essays rethink genre and subgenre against the background of realism’s long-nineteenth-century regime. Laurie Langbauer, for example, reads Jane Austen for a “different set of relations between romance and the novel” (104). Mark Blackwell disengages “experimental fiction” from standard generic thinking, arguing that it may “fuse genres and incorporate new media” as it depicts “different experiences of time” (157, 156). Deidre Lynch surveys critical theories of character over three centuries as they morph into metaphors of specimen or species, monsters or misfits, machines or mechanisms, and ghosts dead or undead. In a particularly original take on a long-read subgenre, John Paul Riquelme scrutinizes the two waves of gothic fiction’s popularity, 1764 to 1825 and 1860 to 1900; this dynamic and variable subgenre changes due to historical, cultural, and intellectual shifts, thus becoming “undead, or irrepressible” (120). Troping incestuous and/or same-sex relations as well as miscegenation, early- and late-wave gothic narratives block “possibilities for conventional marriages,” and so represent the “dark double of domestic realism” (121). In its later phase, Riquelme notes, the gothic stages female agency, colonial revenge, and gender crossing, as the foreigner nevertheless invades the “homeland or the home,” setting the stage for the “instability” of human and racial hierarchies in a “global, post-evolutionary world” (127, 131). Riquelme’s extensive expertise as a critic of the gothic enables the scholar or lover of, say, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), to rethink the subgenre’s history, thematics, and forms.

Two fine critics read across the British novel’s three-plus centuries to capture the experience of reading a novel. Andrew Elfenbein’s essay, “Reading Novels, Alone or in Groups,” consults a range...