A Reader’s Guide To The Twentieth Century Novel In Britain

190 Pages·1993·20.758 MB·English

by  Randall Stevenson

A Reader's Guide to
The
Twentieth-
Century Novel
in Britain
RANDALL STEVENSON
BOSTON
PUBLIC
LIBRARY
Digitized by the Internet Archive
2015
in
https://archive.org/details/readersguidetotOOstev
A Reader's Guide to the
Twentieth-Century Novel
in Britain
For Caroline, Ron, and Vassiliki;
and for Olga
A
Reader's Guide to the
Twentieth-Century Novel
in Britain
Randall Stevenson
The University Press of Kentucky
©
Copyright 1993 by Randall Stevenson
Published by The University Press ofKentucky
Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,
serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre
College ofKentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,
The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky
Historical Society, Kentucky State University,
Morehead State University, Murray State University,
Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,
University ofKentucky, University ofLouisville,
and Western Kentucky University.
Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
are available from the publisher.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
ISBN 0-8131-1857-3
ISBN 0-8131-0823-3 (pbk)
Contents
Introduction
1
1. Elephant and Sandcastle
The Edwardian Years 8
2. A Myriad Impressions
The Modernist Novel 29
3. The Weather in the Streets
The Thirties 55
4. Shadows in Eden
The War Years to the Fifties 74
5. Crossroads
The Sixties to the Eighties 98
6. Margins and the Millennium
Towards 2000 126
Notes 143
Bibliography 149
Index 168
v

Introduction
This study's title raises some questions: preliminary discussion
of them may help to clarify the scope and strategy of what
follows.
Readers, first of all. What readers? This is a question more
sharply - sometimes soberingly - significant for twentieth-
century novelists than for most of their predecessors. For much
of the nineteenth century, novels admired for their literary
quality were also fairly widely read. This broad readership for
literary fiction, however, did not always survive into the
twentieth century. From its very beginning, a resulting uneasi-
ness is sometimes apparent in the work of its more serious and
ambitious authors: in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (1900), for
example, which may have been - for reasons Chapter One will
discuss - the first genuinely modern novel published in Britain.
Much of Conrad's story takes the form of a long after-dinner
monologue, supposedly delivered by his narrator Marlow to a
circle oflargely silent and rather patient listeners. This means of
telling the story might be seen as a figuration of Conrad's
anxiety about the chances of finding an actual audience for his
work - as an attempt to create within the fiction itself an
audience which he suspected might not otherwise exist for it, or
exist on a rather limited scale. As several critics have explained,1
changes in the economics of publishing and the expansion of
literacy in the late nineteenth century made it easier - if not
entirely rewarding - for novelists to indulge, like Conrad, their
1