John Kucich, Jenny Bourne Taylor, eds. The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 3: The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820-1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. xxxii + 548 pp. $160.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-956061-5.
Reviewed by Angharad Saunders
Published on H-HistGeog (May, 2012)
Commissioned by Robert J. Mayhew (University of Bristol)
Novel Times: Sixty Years of Change in English Literary Culture
The nineteenth century saw the coming of age of the novel as both a literary form and a literary practice. From its eighteenth-century beginnings in the epistolary work of Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, and Daniel Defoe, the novel in the nineteenth century saw an explosion in number, breadth, and reach; a concomitant development of form and structure; and a growing professionalization of authorship. The Nineteenth-Century Novel is a self-professed history of this transformation.
In some respects this appears a well-trodden path, for companions, guides ,and contextual studies of what is loosely termed the Victorian novel abound (see for example, Deirdre David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel [2000]; Barbara Dennis, The Victorian Novel [2000]; and Alan Horsman, The Oxford History of English Literature: The Victorian Novel [1991]). Yet in professing itself a history The Nineteenth-Century Novel is subtly different. In the first instance, this difference is evident in its name. It is a work that takes the nineteenth century, not the Victorian novel, as its focus. This is important, for it recognizes that the novel is not coincident with externally imposed cultural boundaries; rather, it works to delimit the nineteenth-century novel from within. The boundary it establishes, 1820-80, is intended to reflect a period of unity between Britain’s writing and reading publics. Although temporally narrower than other works on this period, these dates are seen as synonymous with Britain’s intellectual democratization; mass literacy and the professionalization of writing were spurring one another on, the development of new forms like the serial enabled authors to interact directly with their audience, and transport technology was enabling writers to achieve something of a celebrity status as they reached ever wider audiences. After 1880 this democratization began to falter as the turn towards modernism and a more selective literary culture sought to differentiate between what John Carey terms the intellectuals and the masses (The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 [1992]). Thus, The Nineteenth-Century Novel focuses on a period in which the novel established itself as a crucial arena for civic engagement that was able to transcend class, gender, and region.
In the second instance, The Nineteenth-Century Novel deviates from the norm of much commentary on the nineteenth-century/Victorian novel by avoiding a purely contextual, structural, or thematic approach. As its historical impetus suggests, it is concerned with all aspects of the novel, from the fiction industry of publishers, writers ,and readers in part 1, through genres that range from the relatively obscure “Silver Fork” novels to the more recognized sensation fiction in part 2, to a number of major authors in context in part 3. In the second half of the book part 4 explores a variety of narrative strategies that developed in the period from realism to multiple narration, part 5 focuses on issues of identity within the context of Britain’s multiple kingdoms and empire, while part 6 concludes with discussion of various cultural contexts contemporary to the novel at this time. This wide-ranging approach helps convey and reinforce the democratization and professionalization of literary culture at this time, yet it is also a harbinger of the changes that were to affect this culture after 1880 as popularist themes and forms were displaced by the pursuit of rarer and more selective literary experiences. In this way, The Nineteenth-century Novel makes clear the cohesiveness of literary culture in another way, for it demonstrate that the culture’s strength is also its future weakness: the nature of literary modernism owed to the particularity of the literary culture that went before.
The thirty-one chapters that make up this text are notable for their grounded scholarship. These are not abstract or overly theoretical works, but rather, accessible and thoughtful contributions that do not so much identify new lines of enquiry or ground-breaking ideas, but rather, pull together materialist, biographic, historiographic, internal, and external approaches to help us understand the unity of literary culture at this time. The power of this work thus lies in the sum of its parts, for as a whole the breadth of this work, covering as it does over five hundred works of fiction and an equally impressive number of authors, conveys the richness and complexity of the literary community during the period 1820 to 1880. It is at the interstices of its parts that the power of The Nineteenth-Century Novel lies, for it is here that the cohesiveness of the literary community begins to manifest itself, but also where the text begins to connect outwards, offering new possibilities for collaborative literary scholarship. To illustrate this it is worth turning to two examples.
The first is that of literary practice. In recent years there has been a growing attention to the performance of literature, yet this has tended to be concerned with either the practices of production or reception. It is far from easy, however, to make such clear distinctions between production and consumption, for as various chapters in this text make clear the two were inherently intertwined. As the studies of individual authors like Charles Dickens and George Eliot reveal, not only was their writing practice intertextual in nature, but so too was it bound up with their ability to “read” and respond to public culture, intellectual expectations, and the social mores of the period. The interconnectedness of practice takes on a particular saliency in Graham Law’s chapter on the professionalization of authorship, for this demonstrates how writing intersects with moves to formalize the writer-reader relationship through the evolution of intellectual property rights, the establishment of institutions like the Society of Authors, and the lending libraries. If we hold on to the idea of a cohesive literary practice at this time, but look at it from the perspective of reception rather than production, Deborah Wynne’s chapter “Readers and Reading Practices” intimates the power readers, reading communities, and the publishing industry more generally came to exert on authorial practices. In emphasizing the interconnectedness of the literary world at this time, The Nineteenth-Century Novel poses interesting questions over the nature and value of creativity during this period--was writing a business, did it have a method, did it have a marketable value, did authors write for an audience, or did their writing create an audience? Such questions suggest that we should explore literary practice in broader ways, treating writing and reading not as isolated, individualistic undertakings, but as highly social practices: what did authors and readers achieve together to make the nineteenth century such a formative moment in the history of the novel?
The second area of interest is that of space. In recent years space has received something of a critical rejuvenation within literary studies. Following Franco Moretti attention has turned both to space in literature and literature in space (Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 [1998]). The former explores the fictional writing of space, the latter the real spaces of literature such as the library, the booksellers, and the domestic study. Space in literature receives focused consideration in part 5, where various authors discuss regional, provincial, colonial, and urban spaces within the novels of the period, alongside themes of migration and movement. What is made clear is that this was a time when geography was in the ascendancy within literature. This geography arises through the depiction of landscapes, rituals, and customs as well as through the use of particular tropes like exile and absence. Yet as work in literary geography argues, space is not just a stable backdrop to action, it is also made within the text, and a sense of this is evident in Josephine McDonagh’s discussion of dialect in “Place, Region and Migration,” in Rachel Ablow’s exploration of first person narration in “Addressing the Reader,” and in Jenny Bourne Taylor and John Kucich’s discussion of multiple narration and multiple plots.[1] By looking at the workings of the text these chapters begin to develop a more interdisciplinary understanding of space in literature that turns critical attention towards literature’s creative strategies as well as towards its geographical content. What is more, by adopting an interdisciplinary tone The Nineteenth-Century Novel fuels calls for a more constructive dialogue between literary scholars working within a variety of disciplines, for in sharing conceptual approaches new insights into the novel may emerge.
At a time of mass literacy, when the space of the nation was seemingly being colonized by the novel, literature in space is addressed in various ways within the text. Joanne Shattock, in “The Publishing Industry,” explores the influence of various publishing houses on the novel, Wynne touches upon the spaces of the library, the Mechanics Institute, and the domestic realm as locations where novels were consumed, while more general note is made of the role transport technologies played in circulating novels. In drawing attention to the geography of the novel as a material entity, The Nineteenth-Century Novel points, perhaps a little inadvertently, to the gap that has arisen between textual and literary studies of the nineteenth century. Where textual studies have long been interested in the materiality of the text at this time and the manner in which ideas move and transform, there is comparatively little consideration of how and with what implications novels circulate.[2] This lacuna is not explicitly addressed within The Nineteenth-Century Novel, but in the wealth of novels and novelists the text draws upon it begins to register and intimate the possible webs of movement and transformation the novel is implicated within, proffering new lines of enquiry for literary studies more widely.
The comprehensiveness of The Nineteenth-Century Novel is, perhaps, its greatest strength. As already noted, its intention is not novelty, but the consolidation of, and reflection upon, the range of existing approaches to the study of nineteenth-century literary culture. It is by reading between the lines of these juxtaposed chapters and themes that we can begin to identify new opportunities and points of departure for critical, interdisciplinary study that can bring new insight to the nineteenth-century novel.
Notes
[1]. Shelia Hones, “Literary Geography: Setting and Narrative Space,” Social and Cultural Geography 12 (2011): 685-699.
[2]. David Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003); Steven Shapin, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authorship (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010).
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Citation:
Angharad Saunders. Review of Kucich, John; Taylor, Jenny Bourne, eds., The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 3: The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820-1880.
H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2012.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=36032
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