What do Pamela, Shamela, and Evelina have in common? Who is Coningsby? Where is The Moonstone? When does one need A Room of One's Own? Why is it that Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit? And just how good is the British novel? These are just a few of the questions answered in The Columbia History of the British Novel. John Richetti's comprehensive history takes us from the birth of the novel in the eighteenth century through its social and culture-conscious growing pains in the nineteenth century to its angst-ridden maturity in the twentieth century. Concise, cohesive, and complementary to any collection of must-read classics, The Columbia History of the British Novel challenges and enlightens us by examining canonical writers as well as women and postcolonial novelists. Discover the origins of the novel in the "scandalous" books of Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Delarivier Manley and follow its development through Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne against the backdrop of the novel's meteoric rise in the 1700s. Follow Frances Burney and the rise of the woman novelist, and the gothic novel as invented by Horace Walpole and perfected by Mary Shelley and Matthew Lewis. Remember remarkable reunions in Jane Austen; the bond between chivalry, Waverley, and Sir Walter Scott; the Brontes, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and the tradition of Romantic women's fiction; Charles Dickens and the professionalization of literature; George Eliot and the novel of ideas; and Wilkie Collins and the sensation mania of the 1860s. Continue through the nineteenth century with the "Condition of England" novels of Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell, Hardy's tales of class and sexual difference, and Anglo-Indian perspectives on the empire from Rudyard Kipling and Philip Meadows Taylor. Enter the twentieth century and examine the modern novel with Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Then trace the anti-modernist movement with Kingsley Amis, C. P. Snow, and Angus Wilson and, finally, keep up with contemporaries - Doris Lessing, A. S. Byatt, Anita Brookner, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Jeanette Winterson. The Columbia History of the British Novel lets us do all these things as it presents literary critics: Toni Bowers on early amatory fiction; James Thompson on Jane Austen; Ina Ferris on William Thackeray; David Trotter on Arnold Bennett, George Moore, and George Gissing; Michael Gorra on colonial and postcolonial novels from Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie; Michael Seidel on James Joyce; and Carol McGuirk on postwar feminisms from Margaret Drabble to Angela Carter. The Columbia History of the British Novel examines classics in light of the critical theories of Bakhtin, Lukacs, and Foucault, among others, as well as a panoply of such subgenres as picaresque fiction, adventures, travelogues, utopian and dystopian prose, historical romances, detective novels, sentimental novels, and the Bildungsroman. This superb history also includes brief biographies of novelists discussed and lists of further reading.

Includes index.

Licensing pleasure : literary history and the novel in early modern Britain / William Warner -- Defoe and early narrative / Richard Kroll -- Sex, lies, and invisibility : amatory fiction from the Restoration to mid- century / Toni O'Shaughnessy Bowers -- Richardson and his circle / James Grantham Turner -- Fielding and the novel at mid-century / Jill Campbell -- From Swift to Smollett : the satirical tradition in prose narrative / G.S. Rousseau -- Sterne : comedian and experimental novelist / John Allen Stevenson -- Sentimental novels of the later eighteenth century / G.A. Starr -- Frances Burney and the rise of the woman novelist / Kristina Straub -- The Gothic novel, 1764-1824 / George E. Haggerty -- Novels of the 1790s : action and impasse / Patricia Meyer Spacks -- Jane Austen / James Thompson -- Walter Scott: narrative, history, synthesis / Judith Wilt -- A novel of their own : romantic women's fiction, 1790-1830 / Anne K. Mellor -- "Speak what we think" : the Brontës and women writers / Barry V. Qualls -- Dickens / John Kucich -- Thackeray and the ideology of the gentleman / Ina Ferris -- George Eliot and the novel of ideas / Gillian Beer -- Trollope / N. John Hall -- Wilkie Collins and the sensation novel / Ronald R. Thomas -- Disraeli, Gaskell, and the condition of England / Mary Poovey -- Shaping Hardy's art : vision, class and sex / George Levine -- The nineteenth-century novel and empire / Patrick Brantlinger -- Lewis Carroll and the child in Victorian fiction / Robert M. Polhemus -- The avoidance of naturalism : Gissing, Moore, Grand, Bennett, and others / David Trotter -- Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie : imperialism to postcolonialism / Michael Gorra -- Bennett, Wells, and the persistence of realism / Robert Squillace -- Joseph Conrad / Daniel R. Schwarz -- D.H. Lawrence / Vincent P. Pecora -- Isherwood, Huxley, and the thirties / Michael Rosenthal -- James Joyce / Michael Seidel -- Virginia Woolf / Vicki Mahaffey -- Forster, Ford, and the new novel of manners / David Galef -- Samuel Beckett's postmodern fictions / Brian Finney -- Satire between the wars : Evelyn Waugh and others / George McCartney -- The reaction against modernism : Amis, Snow, Wilson / Rubin Rabinovitz -- Sleeping with the enemy : Doris Lessing in the century of destruction / Lynne Hanley -- Drabble to Carter : fiction by women, 1962-1992 / Carol McGuirk --The contemporary novel / Michael Wood -- Biographies of British novelists.