The Oxford History of the Novel in English

Patrick Parrinder is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Reading and General Editor of The Oxford History of the Novel in English. He is the author of many books, including Shadows of the Future: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy, which won the 1996 Eaton Award, and Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day, published by Oxford University Press in 2006. He was a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow from 2001-4, and currently holds and Arts and Humanities Research Council grant for research in Book History in the period 1880-1940.Andrzej Gasiorek is Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. He was written widely on modernism and on post-war British fiction. He is a co-editor of the journal Modernist Cultures and author of Post War British Fiction: Realism and After (1995), Wyndham Lewis and Modernism (2004) and J.G. Ballard (2005). He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms with Peter Brooker, Deborah Parsons, and Andrew Thacker (2010).

• 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

The choice of scholars is exciting and in itself a sign of editorial wisdom. Every prospective reader will have a personal list of must-reads ... it succeeds particularly well thanks to editors who clearly know when to intervene and when to let their contributors go where they will, a style of editing not masterful but masterly.