The Oxford History of the Novel in English Volume 4: The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880-1940

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. The 36 expert contributors to Volume 4 trace the dramatic changes in British and Irish fiction from the cumbersome 3-volume novels of the 1880s to the 'paperback revolution' in the late 1930s. It looks at the intense debates over the nature and purpose of the novel in the period, the development of new popular sub-genres, and the stratification of the readership of fiction. In a period characterized by huge political and economic upheavals and wholesale revisions of personal morality and sexual and linguistic taboos, the volume traces both the process of modernist experimentation and the work of novelists who registered the social and cultural impact of modernity. The topics covered include national (Irish, Scottish, and Welsh), regional, and women's fiction; the influence of the European novel, of the cinema, and the growth of the modern city; the impact of the Empire, class-consciousness, and the First World War; and such specialized forms as the children's novel, detective stories, and thriller, science fiction and fantasy, and the short story.

1 - The Production of the Novel, 1880-1940
2 - Novelists, Literary Property, and Copyright
3 - Libraries, Reading Patterns, and Censorship
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
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
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
29 - The Irish Novel 1914-1940
30 - The Scottish Novel
31 - Welsh Fiction
32 - English Regional Fiction and National Culture
33 - Working-class 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

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).