Nation and Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day

513 Pages·2006·3.67 MB·English

by  Patrick Parrinder

Nation and Novel
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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Nation
&
Novel
The English Novel from its
Origins to the Present Day
PATRICK PARRINDER
AC
AC
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Preface and Acknowledgements
Nation and Novel is a literary history of the English novel and its dis-
tinctive,oftensubversivecontributiontoideasofnationhood.InitIhave
concentrated for the most part on the major novelists, those whose
writings have been most influential and have attracted a lasting and
international readership. I have engaged in more detailed textual inter-
pretation than is usual in literary history, pursuing the approach to the
nature of the novel form and its relationship to English national identity
that I outline in Chapter 1. My primary intellectual debt in writing this
bookhasbeentothesmallarmyofliterarycriticsandculturalhistorians
who have transformed the study of English fiction of the seventeenth,
eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in recent decades. This
book could not have been written without their labours of historical
research,textualediting,culturaltheorizing,andreinterpretation.Fewof
the scholars on whom I have drawn are explicitly named in the chapters
that follow—the alternative would have been to have put their names,
whichcanbedistractingforthenon-specialistreader,oneverypage—but
myappreciationoftheirworkisnolessheartfeltforthat.Allcitationsin
the text are identified in the notes, and it is there and in the Further
Reading that my indebtedness can be traced.
Nation and Novel has taken me many years to write—I am embar-
rassedtosayhowmany—andtherehavebeenanumberoffalsestarts.At
every stage I have benefited from the encouragement, criticism, and
support of more friends and colleagues than I can possibly name. Above
all,IwouldthanktheUniversityofReadingforinstitutionalandtechnical
support and for research leave, and my students with whom I have dis-
cussedsomanyofthenovelsthatfeatureinthesepages.Iamprofoundly
indebted to the Leverhulme Trust for granting me a Major Research
Fellowship (2001–4), without which this book might never have been
completed. I have received invaluable detailed comments from those
friends who have been willing to read and criticize draft chapters or
sections, including Eric Homberger (a comrade of almost forty years),
AndrzejGasiorek,DavidGervais,DavidSmith,ZohrehSullivan,andJim
Hurt.Earlierversionsofsomeofthismaterialhavebeengivenasseminar
or conference papers and, in some cases, published in journals: in this
respect I would particularly thank David Blewett, Regenia Gagnier and
Angelique Richardson, Annette Gomis, Susana Onega, Max Saunders,
viii Preface and Acknowledgements
JosephWiesenfarth,LawrencePhillips,CatherineHall,andStefanKohl.
Parts of Chapters 6, 9, 12, and 14 have appeared in a different form in
Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Victorian Literature and Culture, and
International Ford Madox Ford Studies, respectively. Others to whom I
am deeply grateful for their encouragement, support, and intellectual
stimulus include Coral Howells (the best of colleagues), Michael Foot
(whosentmebacktoDisraeliandHazlitt),RonKnowles(whopresented
me with a complete set of Scott’s novels), Robert Baldock, Christine
Berberich, Maria Teresa Chialant, Christie Davies, Loraine Fletcher,
JohnLucas,CoraKaplan,HermioneLee,MichelleReid,JohnPilling,Sue
Roe, Sita Schutt, Mohammad Shaheen, John Spiers, John Stotesbury,
John Sutherland, Darko Suvin, Charles Swann, Marina Warner, Frances
Wilson, and Michael Wood. In earlier years I learned much from two
peerlesscriticsofthenovel,TonyTannerandRaymondWilliams.Some
friendsandcolleagueshavehelpedmemostthroughasingleconversation
which set me on a track I might not have found for myself: I think par-
ticularly of Miche`le Barrett, Andrew Gurr, Athena Leoussi, Giulio
Lepschy, Brian Vickers, and others. For unfailing technical support (and
so much else) I am indebted to Carole Robb, Jan Cox, and my daughter
Monika.SpecialthanksareduetomyeditorsatOxfordUniversityPress,
Sophie Goldsworthy, Andrew McNeillie, and Tom Perridge, and to my
copy-editor, Mary Worthington, whose guidance and expertise have
contributed immeasurably to this book in its final form.
My greatest debt is to Jenny Bourne Taylor, who has spurred me to
keepwriting,helpedmetoshapethisworkinmorewaysthansheperhaps
knows, and put up with the burden of living with its author with a love,
cheerfulness, and forbearance that have never failed. Of Jenny’s scho-
larship, intellectual curiosity, and deep knowledge of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-centuryliteratureandhistory,allIcansayisthattheydeserve
a better book than this one.
P. P.
Contents
Introduction 1
1. The Novel and the Nation 9
2. Cavaliers, Puritans, and Rogues: English Prose Fiction
from 1485 to 1700 35
3. Cross-Grained Crusoe: Defoe and the Contradictions of
Englishness 63
4. Histories of Rebellion: From 1688 to 1793 82
5. The Novel of Suffering: Richardson, Fielding, and Goldsmith 106
6. The Benevolent Robber: From Fielding to the 1790s 126
7. Romantic Toryism: Scott, Disraeli, and Others 145
8. Tory Daughters and the Politics of Marriage: Jane Austen,
Charlotte Bronte¨, and Elizabeth Gaskell 180
9. ‘Turn Again, Dick Whittington!’: Dickens and the Fiction
of the City 213
10. At Home and Abroad in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction:
From Vanity Fair to The Secret Agent 232
11. Puritan and Provincial Englands: From Emily Bronte¨ to
D. H. Lawrence 258
12. From Forster to Orwell: The Novel of England’s Destiny 291
13. From Kipling to Independence: Losing the Empire 321
14. Round Tables: Chivalry and the Twentieth-Century English
Novel-Sequence 341
15. Inward Migrations: Multiculturalism, Anglicization, and
Internal Exile 380
Conclusion: On Englishness and the Twenty-First-Century Novel 406
Notes 415
Author Biographies 455
Further Reading 472
Index 487