The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a 12-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the 'literary' novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and tendencies.
The 36 expert contributors to Volume 4 trace the dramatic changes in British and Irish fiction from the cumbersome 3-volume novels of the 1880s to the 'paperback revolution' in the late 1930s. It looks at the intense debates over the nature and purpose of the novel in the period, the development of new popular sub-genres, and the stratification of the readership of fiction. In a period characterized by huge political and economic upheavals and wholesale revisions of personal morality and sexual and linguistic taboos, the volume traces both the process of modernist experimentation and the work of novelists who registered the social and cultural impact of modernity. The topics covered include national (Irish, Scottish, and Welsh), regional, and women's fiction; the influence of the European novel, of the cinema, and the growth of the modern city; the impact of the Empire, class-consciousness, and the First World War; and such specialized forms as the children's novel, detective stories, and thriller, science fiction and fantasy, and the short story.
TABLE OF CONTENTS ; ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ; LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ; GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE ; INTRODUCTION ; EDITORIAL NOTE ; PART I: THE FICTION INDUSTRY 1880-1940 ; 1. The Production of the Novel, 1880-1940 ; 2. Novelists, Literary Property, and Copyright ; 3. Libraries, Reading Patterns, and Censorship ; PART II: THE NOVEL 1880-1914 ; 4. Fiction as an Art: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford ; 5. From Balzac to Proust: English Novelists and Foreign Novels ; 6. Realism and the Fiction of Modern Life: From Meredith to Forster ; 7. Metropolitan Fiction: Slums, Suburbs, and Tales of Mean Streets ; 8. Provincial Fiction and the Decline of 'Puritan England' ; 9. New Women and the New Fiction ; 10. Masters of Male Romance ; 11. Scottish, Irish, and Welsh Fiction in the Late Nineteenth Century ; 12. Bestselling Fiction Before and After the First World War ; PART III: SUB-GENERIC AND SPECIALIZED FICTIONAL FORMS ; 13. Political Novels and Utopian Romances ; 14. The English Detective Story ; 15. Adventure Novels and Thrillers ; 16. Science Fiction and Fantasy ; 17. Gothic and Supernatural Fiction ; 18. The Children's Novel ; 19. Short Stories and Short Fiction ; PART IV: THE NOVEL 1914-1940 ; 20. James Joyce ; 21. Virginia Woolf and Consciousness ; 22. D. H. Lawrence and Metaphysical Fiction ; 23. Modernism and the Fiction of the City ; 24. Cinema and the Novel ; 25. The Novel and the Empire ; 26. The Novel and the First World War ; 27. Women's Novels Between the Wars ; 28. Aristocratic Comedy and Intellectual Satire ; PART V: NATIONAL AND REGIONAL FICTION IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY ; 29. The Irish Novel 1914-1940 ; 30. The Scottish Novel ; 31. Welsh Fiction ; 32. English Regional Fiction and National Culture ; 33. Working-class Fiction ; PART VI: THE CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING OF FICTION ; 34. Impressionism, Naturalism, and Aestheticism: Novel Theory, 1880-1914 ; 35. Popular Fiction and the Critique of Mass Culture ; 36. Inside and Outside the Whale ; COMPOSITE BIBLIOGRAPHY ; INDEX
