Nation and Novel

Born in Cornwall, Patrick Parrinder grew up in London and south-east England and went on to read English at Cambridge University, where he became a Fellow of King's College. He moved to the University of Reading in 1974, and has been a professor there since 1986. He has been a visiting professor in the United States (University of Illinois, 1978-9; University of California, Santa Barbara, 1989) and Canada (McGill University, 1979). Work on Nation and Novel was aided by a Leverhulme Major Research fellowship (2001-4). He has been a contributor to the London Review of Books and many other journals.

• Introduction ; 1. The Novel and the Nation ; 2. Cavaliers, Puritans, and Rogues: English Fiction from 1485 to 1700 ; 3. Cross-Grained Crusoe: Defoe and the Contradictions of Englishness ; 4. Histories of Rebellion: From 1688 to 1793 ; 5. The Novel of Suffering: Richardson, Fielding, and Goldsmith ; 6. The Benevolent Robber: From Fielding to the 1790s ; 7. Romanitic Toryism: Scott, Disraeli, and Others ; 8. Tory Daughters and the Politics of Marriage: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Elizabeth Gaskell ; 9. 'Turn Again, Dick Whittington!': Dickens and the Fiction of the City ; 10. At Home and Abroad in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction: From iVanity Fair/i to iThe Secret Agent/i ; 11. Puritan and Provincial Englands: From Emily Bronte to D. H. Lawrence ; 12. From Forster to Orwell: The Novel of England's Destiny ; 13. From Kipling to Independence: Losing the Empire ; 14. Round Tables: Chivalry and the Twentieth-Century English Novel- Sequence ; 15. Inward Migrations: Multiculturalism, Anglicization, and Internal Exile ; Conclusion: On Englishness and the Twenty-First Century Novel

Review from previous edition The book is crammed with perceptive passages.