The Cambridge companion to English Novelists

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction
• 1 Daniel Defoe
• 2 Samuel Richardson
• 3 Henry Fielding
• 4 Laurence Sterne
• 5 Frances Burney
• 6 Jane Austen
• 7 Walter Scott
• 8 Charles Dickens
• 9 William Makepeace
• 10 Charlotte BrontÃ"
• 11 Emily BrontÃ"
• 12 Elizabeth Gaskell
• 13 Anthony Trollope
• 14 George Eliot
• 15 Thomas Hardy
• 16 Robert Louis Stevenson
• 17 Henry James
• 18 Joseph Conrad
• 19 D. H. Lawrence
• 20 James Joyce
• 21 E. M. Forster
• 22 Virginia Woolf
• 23 Elizabeth Bowen
• 24 Henry Green
• 25 Evelyn Waugh
• 26 Graham Greene
• 27 William Golding
• Further reading
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Providing brief essays on 27 English authors--beginning with Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding--this addition to the Cambridge series should be fairly unexceptionable. However, Poole (Trinity College, Cambridge, UK) anticipates bickering by noting that the anthology is not an attempt at canon formation; he even provides a list of authors excluded. Though no selection of 27 novelists could satisfy everyone's preferences, these pieces--all written for this volume, all by distinguished scholars --are nonetheless satisfying. Seeking to retrospectively locate each figure in the sequence of English novelists, the contributors highlight stylistic innovation and influence. For instance, Melvyn New notes Laurence Sterne's importance as a precursor of such self-conscious novelists as Melville, Pynchon, and Rushdie. Such an approach has the power to suggest that some oft-used categories, such as postmodernism and metafiction, may be a bit myopic. Furthermore, the volume contributes to a synthetic concept of the English novel. Such postwar inclusions as William Golding and Graham Greene are particularly welcome, as is renewed attention to such figures as Walter Scott, Anthony Trollope, and Evelyn Waugh. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. R. K. Mookerjee Eugene Lang College, The New School for the Liberal Arts