This chapter traces the alignment between the Victorian novel, the articulation of geological, or “deep” time, and the emergence of the Anthropocene. The Victorian era is usually understood in terms of “uniformitarian” geology, in which Earth changes slowly and gradually, an understanding that has also informed understandings of the novel in the period. By contrast, this chapter unearths a latent “catastrophism” in Victorian fiction, examining geological events and underground spaces that reconfigure the conditions of possibility in works by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, and Thomas Hardy.

Across the nineteenth century, from Lord Byron to Rudyard Kipling, the dominant blue ecology conceived of the ocean as infinite, unfathomable, and thus impervious to human activity. Humans could not threaten it; rather, it threatened them – a relation Charlotte Brontë, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Louis Stevenson emblematized with the figure of shipwreck. As Thomas Henry Huxley, George Henry Lewes, and other scientists disseminated their discoveries about the marine environment, however, its imagined unknowability and indestructability were put into question. Herman Melville documented the extractive enterprise of whaling; Philip Henry Gosse mourned tidepools ravaged by day trippers with a penchant for natural history. Writing about the tidal reaches of the River Thames, Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew documented two-way traffic between land and water, human and ocean. A new understanding took shape that, in its depiction of the ocean as both affected by and affecting humanity, anticipates our own blue ecology.

There are many ways to define the “hip-hop novel,” each with its limitations. This omnibus review-essay considers titles from the past half-century of American fiction in which hip-hop intervenes as plot device, as character affinity, as author affiliation, as compositional logic, or as a way of limning the targeted readership. It investigates the culture’s representation in literary fiction, from its undigested appearance in the work of authors like Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and Percival Everett, to its deeper integration into novels by Adam Mansbach, Paul Beatty, and Sean Thor Conroe. It also examines the street lit genre initiated by Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, with books that count hip-hop artists as authors (C-Murder, Sister Souljah) or publishers (G-Unit Books). Finally, it looks to young-adult novels by Angie Thomas and Tiffany D. Jackson as a space where a reconciliation of these threads might be possible.

As a founding member of the Jane Austen Society in the 1940s, Bowen helped spearhead the arrangements that, as a world war raged and hundreds of thousands of other homes were destroyed, saved for the nation the Hampshire house where the Regency novelist had written her books. Through the society’s efforts, Chawton Cottage, in its new guise as Jane Austen’s House Museum, became, as it remains, a mainstay of the English heritage industry. In Bowen’s fiction and critical writing, evidence suggests that, despite the norms of periodisation, the later novelist valued her predecessor’s work not as an emblem of tradition and repository of heritage values, but for the way it supplied the formal resources for a modern or modernist future of fiction. More than a practitioner of domestic fiction and marriage plotting, the Austen to whom Bowen pays homage is a figure notable for her surgical precision and mastery of form. The restraint and ironic detachment that Bowen ascribes to Austen is not alien to Bowen’s commitment to human passion. As some of Bowen’s essays on Austen argue, the novelist made passion her study – a study that, Bowen found, could renew the novel form.

Beginning in the 1930s, Elizabeth Bowen wrote literary criticism, book reviews, essays, and other non-fiction works for various media at a remarkably steady pace. Much of this writing centered on the novel – whether on contemporary novels that she reviewed, on classic works of English fiction for which she wrote introductions, or on the novel as a genre with an important history and an uncertain, yet vital, future. This essay traces the development of Bowen’s thinking about the novel and her gradual honing of an idiosyncratic descriptive vocabulary for the genre. It concentrates on a key set of writings that Bowen produced towards the end of, and just after, the Second World War, when she was at the height of her own fame as a novelist and when the history of what she regarded as the ‘free form’ of the novel, especially the recent history of the modernist novel, was a matter of urgent cultural discussion.

This chapter focuses on the philosophical novels of Sarah Fielding and Sarah Scott, younger sisters to fame and zealous proponents of literary and social reform, though perhaps not in that order. Tracking their novels’ trajectory away from the organizing singular narrator toward collective perspectives allows me to diagram a genealogical chain of formal experimentation that runs through Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and The Governess (1749) through Sarah Scott’s Description of Millenium Hall (1762). This chapter offers a new approach that discerns the patterned formal framework that undergirds how these novels imagine reparative communal responses to gender-based harms and women-centered alternatives to possessive individualism.

This chapter demonstrates how William Earle’s abolitionist novel Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800) uses interpolated tales, along with other embedded forms, to vocalize multiple perspectives across cultural and racial difference, while acknowledging the vexed ethics of using a print text to speak for populations largely excluded from literacy and the literary marketplace. Interrupting the otherwise epistolary narrative, “Makro and Amri: An African Tale” allows an enslaved mother to transmit her native Feloop culture to her Jamaica-born son, inspiring him to lead the rebellion for which they both die fighting. Thus allying herself with violence and animating the plot, Amri emerges as one of the most powerful female speakers in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fiction. Under this approach, the colonial hierarchy of speaker and spoken for emerges as another lopsided power relation available to be acknowledged, denaturalized, and perhaps undermined once we observe and name the ironic breach between novel and tale.

This chapter focuses on the problems of authorship that hover around The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, an autobiographical text embedded in Tobias Smollett’s Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), and how these debates have served as a proxy for critics’ different accounts of the relation between gender and form. I demonstrate how the notorious aristocrat Lady Vane uses her scandalous memoir to voice her real marital complaints within Smollett’s novel, which despite a predominating misogyny, endorses her bid to rewrite her fallen public character as a literary one. As seen in chapter one, the idea that a woman’s speech could play a determinative role in conferring social legitimacy is treated as a conjectural privilege exercisable only in fiction. The resistant reading I offer here highlights the undeniable limitations of how Smollett and his text think about gender, while finding room for modern readers to re-engage meaningfully with both texts, novel and tale. Discovery of the first standalone publication of Memoirs, as a sumptuous art book with erotic illustrations by Véra Willoughby in 1925, demonstrates the radical feminist and queer potentiality of the text and its embedded form.

When the dryly assured narrator of Northanger Abbey introduces a new character by summarily denying “the necessity of a long and minute detail from Mrs. Thorpe herself, of her past adventures and sufferings,” Jane Austen effectively kicks Lady Vane, Leonora, Cynthia, Miss Price, Amri and this book’s chorus of motley tale-tellers out of the novel. Of course, as documented by the previous six chapters, Don Quixote, Henry Fielding, and other characters, authors, critics and common readers had been threatening to do as much for generations, and indeed, from the first. However, as we have now seen, that same propensity of eliciting such critical disfavor had already been a proven if unarticulated feature of the interpolated tales that early novelists continued to wield, disrupting their plots. For the two centuries between Don Quixote and Obi, interpolated tales were all but omnipresent: a pervasive, yet still consistently aggravating feature that co-constituted the novel form and provided critics and readers with an off-center vantage point from which to consider it. But sometime on or about 1800, novel relations changed, internally and formally, in a shift of balance from one prevailing version of heteroglossia to another.

Exploring how early novels experimented with stories-within-stories, Katie Charles shows how such interpolated tales confronted readers with an array of interpretive challenges. Considering the habitual nature of these interruptions by seemingly throwaway extra plots, she investigates why they persistently unnerve readers with the sense that they have “lost the plot.” Taking the bold critical step of recognizing interpolated tales as a category worthy of analysis, she raises new and exciting questions around how these tales should be read and by what measure they might be said to “count.” The peculiar literary history reconstructed here offers a key for assessing how various texts and readers think about who gets to speak and be heard, choices of particular import in the context of gender difference and its historical relation to public speech. Lost Plots argues that attending to this forgotten body of evidence opens up a new account of gendered speech and power.

This chapter traces the long history of critical arguments that frame Henry Fielding’s interpolated tales as feminized “freckles” and “blemishes” that mar his otherwise masculine plots. Taking the much-squabbled about “History of Leonora” from Joseph Andrews (1742) as a case study, I examine the interpretive dilemmas posed by a tale that purports not only to speak across the gender binary but across an ossified, almost caricatured gender binary. My close reading of “The History of Leonora” contends with its intertextuality, likely joint authorship with Sarah Fielding, and structuring around negative space. Based on this body of evidence, I argue that a singularly nuanced female subjectivity emerges from the clash of tale-narrator, heroine, and spiteful town gossips, all of them women whose talking about women enables a critique of the social possibilities open to them – one that shimmies free space for alternatives to reflexively binary thinking.

In this reading of Frances Sheridan’s sentimental novel, The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), centering a short embedded tale, previously dismissed as “padding,” flips the script such that didacticism serves as an object of critique instead of its vehicle. As a captivity narrative about debt and consent, “The History of Miss Price” tells of how its plucky tale heroine escapes a sexually predatory creditor, eventually achieving her comic ending with the help of Sidney Bidulph, the otherwise passive novel heroine. In a plot line more famously recirculated by Susanna Rowson in Charlotte Temple (1794) and Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839), Sheridan provides a public forum for legitimating gendered harms previously silenced as too private to be shareable. As a successful speech act, the tale rebukes the novel heroine’s supposedly exemplary model of female passivity and quiescence, and its form, message, and critique are reiterated in the sequel, Conclusion of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1767).

This chapter explores how the concept of the collective entered into and helped to shape important works of literature during and after the Second World War. It takes the ubiquitous wartime speeches of Winston Churchill as a key site for articulating the idea of the ‘people’s war’, offering a reading of these ubiquitous texts. In relation to Churchill’s version of a collective wartime identity and experience, the chapter looks at writings by H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, and George Orwell, all of whom wrote passionate and deeply felt works that offer their own assessment of the idea of people’s war, or of the collective more generally, as a social project. Ultimately, the chapter suggests that the problem of the collective in wartime is a central one in literary modernism.

This chapter discusses certain ways that literature represented ‘the people’, and the idea of national community, during the Thatcher years in Britain. Literature essays a range of strategies to evoke collective life: using specific characters as representative of general trends, depicting groups, or making explicit statements about the state of the nation. Nonetheless, in the literature of the 1980s evocations of ‘the people’ prove difficult to sustain: an observation supported by the social and political analysis offered by Stuart Hall. In reflecting a single ‘people’, writers often register the strain, frame the task with irony, or eschew the attempt altogether, and seek to evoke the collective experiences of particular communities. Writers considered in this chapter include Seamus Heaney, Margaret Drabble, Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison, Jackie Kay, Geoff Dyer, and Martin Amis.

Lukács engaged in a series of exchanges with his contemporaries on the Left, including Bloch and Brecht, in which he defended realism as the only valid form of the novel, and they promoted modernism. This debate helps us to see the value and the limitations of the realist form and the need for other forms of fictional narrative. The representation of the future under climate change would seem to be something beyond realism’s grasp because such a radically different world is by definition far outside the quotidian. And yet, climate change is itself a reality that fiction would seem to be obliged to address. in The Great Derangement (2016), Amitav Ghosh tries to explain why fiction has failed to address the problem of climate change, and he blames the novel as a form. Ghosh wants fiction that embodies a posthumanist perspective, but the novel form is dependent on human agency. A variety of novels address climate change, and most combine realism with other narrative modes. Realism is needed in order to make these novels persuasive, though it is unlikely, given the current reach of print fiction, that a climate novel will have the inpact that Uncle Tom’s Cabin once did.

The standard trajectory of realism, modernism, and postmodernism represents a misunderstanding of the novel’s history. The innovations of modernism and postmodernism have not rendered realism obsolete, as the vast majority of novelists continued to produce in the realist mode. John Updike in his criticism explicitly placed himself in the realist tradition of American fiction he traced to William Dean Howells, and Updike’s connection to realism was widely recognized. But the Rabbit novels do not merely continue the older fictional conventions of realism. Rather, they make use of modernist techniques, such as stream of consciousness narration, and they describe aspects of life absent from earlier realism. They regard mass culture as a significant element of the world they represent, and provide an alternative to the theory of mass culture proposed by Horkheimer and Adorno. In the first two of thesde, Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux, music is a significant part of this. What Updike’s novels suggest is not just a new way of telling a story, but that there was a new reality as electronic mass media took up an increasing amount of attention.

This chapter looks at the connection between travel and narrative fiction in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It shows how writers of novels borrowed from, expanded on, and reimagined accounts of actual voyages and descriptions of faraway places. Authors such as Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift took details and ideas from travelers such as William Dampier, Woodes Rogers, and James Cooke. Well-known novels, including Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), reflected on and reconsidered England’s relationship to the wider world beyond Europe and the creation of the British Empire – at times critically, at times enthusiastically. The purpose of travelers, for the most part, was to say what they saw and did. It was the prerogative of writers of fiction to digest these facts and reflect on what they meant.