Marina MacKay - The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

Authors

Margaret Atwood Heidi Macpherson

Jane Austen Janet Todd

Samuel Beckett Ronan McDonald

Walter Benjamin David Ferris

J. M. Coetzee Dominic Head

Joseph Conrad John Peters

Jacques Derrida Leslie Hill

Emily Dickinson Wendy Martin

George Eliot Nancy Henry

T. S. Eliot John Xiros Cooper

William Faulkner Theresa M. Towner

F. Scott Fitzgerald Kirk Curnutt

Michel Foucault Lisa Downing

Robert Frost Robert Faggen

Nathaniel Hawthorne Leland S. Person

Zora Neale Hurston Lovalerie King

James Joyce Eric Bulson

Herman Melville Kevin J. Hayes

Sylvia Plath Jo Gill

Edgar Allen Poe Benjamin F. Fisher

Ezra Pound Ira Nadel

Jean Rhys Elaine Savory

Edward Said Conor McCarthy

Shakespeare Emma Smith

Shakespeares Comedies Penny Gay

Shakespeares History Plays Warren Chernaik

Shakespeares Tragedies Janette Dillon

Harriet Beecher Stowe Sarah Robbins

Mark Twain Peter Messent

Edith Wharton Pamela Knights

Walt Whitman M. Jimmie Killingsworth

Virginia Woolf Jane Goldman

William Wordsworth Emma Mason

W. B. Yeats David Holdeman

Topics

The American Short Story Martin Scofield

Comedy Eric Weitz

Creative Writing David Morley

Early English Theatre Janette Dillon

English Theatre, 16601900 Peter Thomson

Francophone Literature Patrick Corcoran

Modern British Theatre Simon Shepherd

Modern Irish Poetry Justin Quinn

Modernism Pericles Lewis

Narrative (second edition) H. Porter Abbott

The Nineteenth-Century American Novel Gregg Crane

The Novel Marina MacKay

Postcolonial Literatures C. L. Innes

Postmodern Fiction Bran Nicol

Russian Literature Caryl Emerson

Scenography Joslin McKinney and Philip Butterworth

The Short Story in English Adrian Hunter

Theatre Historiography Thomas Postlewait

Theatre Studies Christopher Balme

Tragedy Jennifer Wallace

Victorian Poetry Linda K. Hughes

Marina MacKay

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521713344

ISBN 978-0-521-88575-1 Hardback

ISBN 978-0-521-71334-4 Paperback

Writing this book would never have crossed my mind had it not first crossed the mind of Ray Ryan at Cambridge University Press. Its a real pleasure to express my gratitude to Ray for his truly extraordinary support over a number of years and projects. I would like also to thank his colleagues for their exemplary responsiveness, and to thank the Presss readers for reviewing the proposal with such insight and generosity. A number of collaborations and conversations in recent years helped me to figure out what I wanted to say, and my thanks to Miriam Bailin, Robert Caserio, Michael Gardiner, Andrzej Gasiorek, Allan Hepburn, Peter Kalliney, Pericles Lewis, Leo Mellor, Petra Rau, Neil Reeve, Wolfram Schmidgen, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Steve Zwicker. Much older debts, unthinkingly incurred but gratefully remembered, are owed to Mr. Tony Ashe, Professor Jon Cook, Professor Robert Crawford, Dr. Michael Herbert, Dr. Ian Johnson, Dr. Paul Magrs, Mr. Phillip Mallett, the late Professor Lorna Sage, and Professor Victor Sage. Sincere thanks, too, to my senior colleagues David Lawton, Joe Loewenstein, and Vince Sherry for moral support and more, and to my wonderful undergraduates at Washington University in St. Louis for their braininess and sheer good will. My affectionate thanks, finally, to Lara Bovilsky and Donald MacKay for timely comic distraction, and to my best friend Dan Grausam for everything else.

St. Louis,

Many of the eighteenth-century critics who observed the appearance of this new literary species would have been astounded to learn that the frivolous, fashionable novel so beloved of silly females would eventually be considered deserving of a scholarly introduction (with the Cambridge University Press imprimatur, no less!). And not even the novelists themselves could have imagined that they were contributing to what would ultimately become the major literary form of modern times, both inside and outside the university. This book begins by telling the story of that extraordinary rise, before going on to describe in more detail the particular formal characteristics and qualities we associate with the novel. Later chapters are concerned with types of novel: the genre novel, the experimental novel, the novel of nation and community.

Each chapter addresses a formal or historical aspect of the novel, drawing examples and illustrations from a range of novels often from very different times and places. Between these main chapters are more sustained readings of individual works, intended to suggest how the generalizations of the summary chapters might be put to specific uses. Arranged mostly in the order of their publication, these interchapters collectively offer, well, certainly not the story but one story of the novel running from Cervantes to Rushdie. But these should be considered optional reading, and, if the main chapters work as they were intended, student readers will be able to think of favorite novels with which to replace mine. Although the books broad drift is historical, moving closer to the present day as it proceeds, the main chapters are fairly self-contained, and can be read selectively and/or out of order.