ISBN : 9780198749394
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 and tendencies. This volume offers the fullest and most nuanced account available of the last eight decades of British prose fiction. It begins during the Second World War, when novel production fell by more than a third, and ends at a time when new technologies have made possible the publication of an unprecedented number of fiction titles and have changed completely the relationship between authors, publishers, the novel and the reader. The collection is made up of thirty-four chapters by leading scholars in the field who detail the impact of global warfare on the novel from the Second World War to the Cold War to the twenty-first century; the reflexive continuities of late modernism; the influence of film and television on the novel form; mobile and fluid connections between sexuality, gender and different periods of women's writing; a broad range of migrant and ethnic fictions; and the continuities and discontinuities of prose fiction in different regional, national, class and global contexts. Across the volume there is a blurring of the boundary between genre fiction and literary fiction, as the literary thinking of the period is traced in the spy novel, the children's novel, the historical novel, the serial novel, shorter fiction, the science fiction novel, and the comic novel. The final chapters of the volume explore the relationship of twenty-first century fiction to post-war culture, and show how this new fiction both emerges from the history of the novel, and prefigures the novel to come.
Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette: Introduction: The Life and Death of the Post-War Novel
Part 1: 1940-1973: Key Figures and Contexts
1 Andrew Nash: The Material History of the Novel I: 1940-1973
2 Lara Feigel: Fiction during the Second World War
3 Robert Eaglestone: The Question of Evil: Neo-Christianity and the Novel
4 Nicola Wilson: Working Class Fictions
5 John McLeod: The Novel and the End of Empire
6 C.L. Innes: Migrant Writing
7 Liz Sage: Women's Fiction after the War
8 Zachary Leader: The Movement towards Englishness
9 Tyrus Miller: The Continuities of Late Modernism: Before and after Beckett
10 Philip Tew: Comedy, Class and Nation
11 Michael Cronin: In the Wake of Joyce: Irish Writing after 1939
12 Rod Mengham: Judging the Distance: Fiction with Europe in Mind
Part 2: Genres/Subgenres
13 Laura Marcus: Cinematic and Televisual Fiction
14 John Brannigan: The Novel as History
15 Nick Bentley: The Novel Sequence
16 Adrian Hunter: Novel, Novella, Short Story
17 Martin Priestman: Spies, Detectives and Heroes: From the Cold War to the War on Terror
18 Peter Hunt: The Children's Novel
19 Emma Parker: Queers, Chaps, Chicks and Lads
20 Nadia Valman: Jewish Fictions
21 Liam Connell: The Regional and the Global
22 Sherryl Vint: Dystopian Science Fiction and the Return of the Gothic
Part 3: 1973-Present: Key Figures and Contexts
23 Andrew Nash: The Material History of the Novel II 1973-Present
24 Paul Crosthwaite: Fiction and Trauma from the Second World War to 9/11
25 David James: Decentring Englishness
26 Mary Eagleton: The Feminist Novel
27 Peter Morey: Black British and British Asian Fiction
28 Matthew Hart: A Plurinational Literature? Nationalism in British and Northern Irish Fiction Since 1970
29 Scott Hames: The New Scottish Renaissance?
30 Derek Hand: Ireland and Europe after 1973
31 Kirsti Bohata: Welsh Fiction: 1979, 1997 and after
Part 4: Approaching the Twenty-first Century Novel
32 Berthold Schoene: Twenty-First Century Fiction
33 Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette: The Future of the Novel
