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,
traditions, and tendencies. Volume 1 explores the long period
between the origins of printing in late fifteenth-century England
and the establishment of the novel as a recognized, reputable genre
in the mid eighteenth century. Later chapters in the volume provide
original, authoritative accounts of innovations by the major
canonical authors, notably Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, who
have traditionally been seen as pioneering 'the rise of the novel',
in Ian Watt's famous phrase. With its extended chronological and
geographical range, however, the volume also contextualizes these
eighteenth-century developments in revelatory new ways, to provide
a fresh, bold, and comprehensive account of the richness and
variety of fictional traditions as they developed over two and a
half centuries. The volume thus establishes a newly comprehensive
mapping of early fiction that rectifies the shortcomings and
exclusions of established 'rise of the novel' scholarship. These
include the relative neglect of the importance of women writers,
following Behn's reinvention of romance in the 1680s, in shaping
novelistic themes and techniques; a restrictive generic definition
based on circumstantial and psychological realism to the exclusion
of non-realist modes that flourished for centuries beforehand; a
teleological bias that overlooks or downgrades phases and types of
fiction production, such as the richly variegated category of
Elizabethan fiction, that resist being assimilated into narratives
of evolution or ascent; a reductive Anglocentrism that leaves out
of account the translation, reception, and pervasive influence from
the sixteenth century onwards of, among much else, the 'ancient
novel' of Apuleius and Heliodorus; Byzantine, Arabian, and Eastern
traditions; the Italian novella from Boccaccio to Bandello; Spanish
picaresque and anti-romance; and a range of French narrative modes
from Rabelais to Marivaux. Alongside these key contexts, the volume
treats the emergent novel as, above all, a phenomenon of print
culture, with close attention to conditions of authorship,
publishing, and reading across the extended period.
General
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