The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists

A survey of the most important British novelists of the past 250 years, for students of British fiction.

Adrian Poole (Edited by)

9780521691574, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 10 December 2009

482 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.76 kg

In this Companion, leading scholars and critics address the work of the most celebrated and enduring novelists from the British Isles (excluding living writers): among them Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hardy, James, Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf. The significance of each writer in their own time is explained, the relation of their work to that of predecessors and successors explored, and their most important novels analysed. These essays do not aim to create a canon in a prescriptive way, but taken together they describe a strong developing tradition of the writing of fictional prose over the past 300 years. This volume is a helpful guide for those studying and teaching the novel, and will allow readers to consider the significance of less familiar authors such as Henry Green and Elizabeth Bowen alongside those with a more established place in literary history.

Introduction Adrian Poole
1. Daniel Defoe Tom Keymer
2. Samuel Richardson Peter Sabor
3. Henry Fielding Jane Spencer
4. Laurence Sterne Melvyn New
5. Frances Burney Vivien Jones
6. Jane Austen Jocelyn Harris
7. Walter Scott Alison Lumsden
8. Charles Dickens Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
9. William Makepeace Thackeray Nicholas Dames
10. Charlotte Brontë Patsy Stoneman
11. Emily Brontë Heather Glen
12. Elizabeth Gaskell Brigid Lowe
13. Anthony Trollope David Skilton
14. George Eliot Jill L. Matus
15. Thomas Hardy Penny Boumelha
16. Robert Louis Stevenson Adrian Poole
17. Henry James Michiel Heyns
18. Joseph Conrad Robert Hampson
19. D. H. Lawrence Michael Bell
20. James Joyce Maud Ellmann
21. E. M. Forster Santanu Das
22. Virginia Woolf Maria DiBattista
23. Elizabeth Bowen Victoria Coulson
24. Henry Green Bharat Tandon
25. Evelyn Waugh Anthony Lane
26. Graham Greene Dorothea Barrett
27. William Golding Robert Macfarlane
Further reading
Index.

Subject Areas: Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]