An Introduction to the English Novel 1. [antikvár]

PREFACE The purpose of this book and its successor (which will bring the story up to the present day) is not to attempt a history of the English novel. But because the novel, like every other literary form, is a product of history, I have tried, in the first two Parts, to indicate something of the historical development of fiction and to face—if not to answer satisfactorily—the essential questions: why did the novel arise at all, and why should it have arisen when it did.^ The third part of the book makes even less claim to exhaustive-ness. I have taken nine well-known nineteenth-century novels (of which six are included in the present volume) and tried to bring out in analysis certain critical questions which emerge from a study of each. Three reasons in particular have led me to adopt this method: (i) the field, by the nineteenth century, has become so wide that an exhaustive treatment would be in any event impossible, (2) novels tend to be rather long and for any course of study in this subject it is useful to concentrate on a reading list that is both short and accessible, and (3) critics of the novel appear to have shirked, with a few honourable exceptions, the business of analysis and of disciplined critical evaluation. Although I would not for a moment claim to have said the last word about any of the books treated here I have consistently tried to get to the heart of each novel, to pose the questions: what kind of a novel is this.^ What is it about.^ It is not enough to consider a novel, any more than a poem or a play, simply in terms of plot-construction and characters. We have to see each novel whole before we can attempt to assess the parts or even to decide the criteria relevant to our judgments.