The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume Four: The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880–1940 (review)

Near the close of his fine essay on novel theory from 1880 to 1914, which itself comes near the close of this information-rich volume of essays, Jesse Matz briefly takes up The English Novel (1913), George Saintsbury’s once-standard survey of the genre from its origins in medieval romance to its High Victorian apotheosis. Saintsbury “rarely tries for novel theory,” Matz points out. His work “is mainly criticism, focused on the particular virtues of particular novels, on literary history, and on the broader generic development of the novel” (553). This observation is offered not as a critique of Saintsbury’s methods but as a description of them, a way to begin parsing the strengths and weaknesses of the work at hand. You can learn much from The English Novel even now, so long as you are clear about what Saintsbury is and is not attempting to do.

With some qualification, Matz’s description can be applied to most of the essays in The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel, especially those dealing with the Victorian years. Again, this is observation, not censure. By any standard, this volume—the first to be published of the projected twelve volumes of The Oxford History of the Novel in English—is an impressive and vital work of scholarship. Each of its thirty-six chapters is at once informed and informative; together, they map with admirable thoroughness the terrain of the novel during a time of often exhilarating transformation. On this particular map, the terrain is marked by a conspicuous fault line running along the year 1914. While several of the contributors venture across it, most confine themselves, generally with good reason, to one side or the other. What unites nearly all of the pieces is a commitment to a sturdily empiricist literary history. Information—expertly chosen, synthesized, and presented—is the book’s most valuable asset. Of theoretical speculation there is not so much. Most of the contributors indeed rarely try for novel theory, even as they marvel, and rightly so, at all the vigorous theorizing that went on in the period itself.

One way to indicate the manifest virtues of this volume along with its few limitations is to point out that the longest index entry belongs to H. G. Wells. Wells is mentioned, and seldom just in passing, in no fewer than twenty-five of the thirty-six chapters. Wells’s career of course spans nearly the entire era, during which he remained not just active but relevant. Yet longevity only partially accounts for the way he pervades the volume. Among the more welcome features of The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel is the coverage it gives to the many popular and market-specific varieties of fiction that flourished in these years. Wells helped shape an astonishing number of what are here designated as “Subgeneric and Specialized Fictional Forms” (the heading for Part III): science fiction, gothic and the supernatural, adventure novels and male romances, detective fiction, thrillers, utopias, and fantasies. In a sense, the volume gives Oxford’s imprimatur to the last several decades’ worth of canon-widening work, and the results are bracing. In addition to “subgeneric and specialized” fiction, extended (and again welcome) attention is given to regional and national novel traditions. Chapters on Irish, Scottish, and Welsh fiction offer finely calibrated evaluations of these traditions as simultaneously autonomous from and permeated by the literary culture emanating from London.

Overall, this is a volume committed to inclusivity, as well as to a definition of the novel which is nothing if not elastic and porous. Borders are widened to take in what earlier critics exiled as subliterary, while internal boundaries are kept permeable. The landscape is shown to be diverse but not segregated. Ley lines...