The Novel: A Biography

by Michael Schmidt

Overview

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography, Michael Schmidt does full justice to its complexity.

Like his hero Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature, Schmidt chooses as his traveling companions not critics or theorists but “artist practitioners,” men and women who feel “hot love” for the books they admire, and fulminate against those they dislike. It is their insights Schmidt cares about. Quoting from the letters, diaries, reviews, and essays of novelists and drawing on their biographies, Schmidt invites us into the creative dialogues between authors and between books, and suggests how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English.

Schmidt believes there is something fundamentally subversive about art: he portrays the novel as a liberalizing force and a revolutionary stimulus. But whatever purpose the novel serves in a given era, a work endures not because of its subject, themes, political stance, or social aims but because of its language, its sheer invention, and its resistance to cliché—some irreducible quality that keeps readers coming back to its pages.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674724730
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	05/12/2014
Pages:	1200
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 10.20(h) x 2.30(d)

About the Author

Michael Schmidt is Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow and a writer in residence at St John’s College, Cambridge. He is founder and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Introduction 4

1 "Literature Is Invention": Mandeville's Travels, Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon, De Proprietatibus Rerum 17

2 True Stories William Caxton Thomas Malory, Foxe's Book of Martyrs 25

3 Three Springs Sir Philip Sidney Fray Antonio de Guevara John Lyly Thomas Nashe 33

4 Before Irony John Bunyan 54

5 Enter America Aphra Behn Zora Neale Hurston 63

6 Impersonation Daniel Defoe Truman Capote J. M. Coetzee 74

7 Proportion François Rabelais Sir Thomas Urquhart Jonathan Swift Samuel Johnson Voltaire Oliver Goldsmith Alasdair Gray 93

8 Sex and Sensibility Samuel Richardson Eliza Haywood Anna Laetitia Barbauld John Cleland 112

9 "Nuvvles" Miguel de Cervantes Alain-René Lesage Henry Fielding Tobias Smollett Frederick Marryat Richard Dana C. S. Forester Patrick O'Brian 128

10 "A Cock and a Bull" Laurence Sterne 149

11 The Eerie Horace Walpole Clara Reeve William Beckford Ann Radcliffe Matthew Gregory Lewis Charles Brockden Brown Charles Robert Maturin 162

12 Listening Maria Edgeworth John McGahera James Hogg Sir Walter Scott John Gait Susan Ferrier 177

13 Manners Fanny Burney Jane Austen 199

14 Roman à Thèse Thomas Love Peacock William Godwin Edward Bulwer-Lytton Mary Shelley Thomas Carlyle 219

15 Declarations of Independence Washington Irving James Fenimore Cooper Edgar Allan Poe 235

16 The Fiction Industry Charles Dickens Harrison Ainsworth Elizabeth Gaskell Wilkie Collins 252

17 Gothic Romance Charlotte Bronte Emily Bronte Anne Bronte 284

18 Real Worlds Frances Trollope William Makepeace Thackeray Anthony Trollope Benjamin Disraeli 295

19 "Thought-Divers" Nathaniel Hawthorne Herman Melville Harriet Beecher Stowe 320

20 The Human Comedy Victor Hugo Stendhal Honoré de Balzac Gustave Flaubert Étnile Zola 349

21 Imperfection George Moore George Eliot Louisa May Alcott George Meredith George Gissitig Samuel Butler Edmund Gosse 372

22 Braveries Robert Louis Stevenson W. H. Hudson Bruce Chatwin Richard Jefferies William Morris Charles Kingsley Henry Rider Haggard Rudyard Kipling 404

23 Smoke and Mirrors Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) Rudolf Raspe Bram Stoker Ouida Marie Corelli Walter Pater Oscar Wilde Denton Welch Arthur Conan Doyle J. M. Barrie Max Beerbohm Kenneth Grahame 432

24 Pessimists Thomas Hardy Joseph Conrad Stephen Crarte 453

25 Living Through Ideas Nikolai Gogol Ivan Turgenev Fyodor Dostoyevsky Leo Tolstoy 477

26 The Fate of Form William Dean Howells Henry James Cynthia Ozick Mrs. Humphry Ward Edith Wharton Sinclair Lewis Marcel Proust Dorothy Richardson Anthony Powell Henry Williamson C. P. Snow 489

27 Prodigality and Philistinism Artemus Ward Mark Twain George Washington Cable Theodore Dreiser Frank Norris Jack London Upton Sinclair 527

28 Blurring Form Willa Cather Sarah Orne Jewett Marilynne Robinson Janet Lewis Kate Chopin Sherwood Anderson Gertrude Stein Laura Riding Mary Butts 553

29 Social Concerns H. G. Wells Rebecca West Arnold Bennett John Galsworthy Somerset Maugham Hugh Walpole Frederic Raphael Aldous Huxley Arthur Koestler George Orwell 572

30 Portraits and Caricatures of the Artist James Joyce Wyndham Lewis Samuel Beckett G. K. Chesterton Anthony Burgess Russell Hoban Flann O'Brien Donald Barthelme 604

31 Tone and Register Virginia Woolf E. M. Forster Paul Scott J. G. Farrell Norman Douglas Ronald Firbank Pelham Grenville Wodehouse Kazuo Ishiguro Elizabeth Boweu Edna O'Brien Jeanette Winterson 638

32 Teller and Tale D. H. Lawrence John Cowper Powys T. F. Powys Sylvia Townsend Warner Henry Miller Anaïs Nin Lawrence Durrell Richard Aldington William S. Burroughs Jack Kerouac 671

33 Truth to the Impression Ford Madox Ford Ernest Hemingway Jean Rhys Djuna Barnes John Updike Don DeLillo Joyce Carol Oates Anne Tyler Julian Barnes 702

34 Elegy Thornton Wilder William Faulkner Ellen Glasgow Eudora Welty Carson McCullers Flannery O'Connor Harper Lee Ralph Ellison Toni Morrison Thomas Wolfe Malcolm Lowry Joyce Cary 737

35 Essaying Edmund Wilson Gore Vidal John Dos Passos E. E. Cummings Mary McCarthy Katherine Anne Porter F. Scott Fitzgerald John Steinbeck John O'Hara Nathanael West William Gaddis David Foster Wallace 770

36 Enchantment and Disenchantment Vladimir Nabokov Ayn Rand Radclyffe Hall Ivy Compton-Burnett Elizabeth Taylor Muriel Spark Gabriel Josipovici Christine Brooke-Rose B. S. Johnson William Gass John Barth Harry Mathews Walter Abish Thomas Pynchon Jonathan Franzen 810

37 Genre Daphne du Maurier Barbara Cartland Catherine Cookson, et al. Bret Harte Zane Grey, et al. Raymond Chandler Dashiell Hammett Elmore Leonard Agatha Christie Dorothy L. Sayers, et al. H. P. Lovecraft Stephen King, et al. Robert A. Heinlem Isaac Asimov Arthur C. Clarke Ray Bradbury Philip K. Dick Ursula Le Guin, et al. 851

38 Convention and Invention David Garnett J. B. Priestley L. P. Hartley Richard Hughes Storm Jameson Walter Greenwood H. E. Bates Ethel Mannin Olivia Manning Stella Gibbons V. S. Pritchett Robert Graves Doris Lessing Angela Carter Elaine Feinstein Colm Tóibín Alan Hollinghurst 882

39 Propaganda Christopher Isherwood Edward Upward Paul Bowles Jane Bowles Edmund White Henry Green Evelyn Waugh William Boyd Graham Greene R. K. Narayan Mulk Raj Anand Rohinton Mistry V. S. Naipaul Caryl Phillips Timothy Mo 912

40 The Blues Richard Wright Claude McKay Jean Toomer Langston Hughes James Baldwin William Styron 950

41 Displacement and Expropriation Chinua Achebe Ngugi Wa Thiong'o George Lamming Wilson Harris Ben Okri Wole Soyinka Nadine Gordimer Olive Schreiner Bessie Head Alice Walker 969

42 Making Space Henry Handel Richardson Patrick White David Malouf Peter Carey Christina Stead Robertson Davies Margaret Atwood Michael Ondaatje Maurice Shadbolt Janet Frame Keri Hulme Anita Desai Salman Rushdie Earl Lovelace 990

43 Win, Place, and Show William Golding Angus Wilson Margaret Drabble Malcolm Bradbury David Lodge Iris Murdoch A. S. Byatt Hilary Mantel John Braine Alan Sillitoe Kingsley Amis John Fowles Ian McEwan Peter Ackroyd Graham Swift J. G. Ballard 1017

44 Truths in Fiction, The Metamorphosis of Journalism E. L. Doctorow John Gardner Norman Mailer Kurt Vonnegut Louis-Ferdinand Celine Joseph Heller Joan Didion Tom Wolfe Hunter S. Thompson Cormac McCarthy Michael Chabon Richard Ford Bret Easton Ellis 1048

45 Pariahs Franz Kafka Saul Bellow Bernard Malamud Mordecai Richler J. D. Salinger Philip Roth Jeffrey Eugenides Paul Auster Martin Amis 1079

Timeline 1109

Index 1147

Editorial Reviews

…a herculean literary labor, carried off with swashbuckling style and critical aggression.

The New York Times Book Review - John Sutherland

If you want your books a bit quieter and more extensive chronologically, then do try poet Michael Schmidt’s 700-year history of the novel, The Novel: A Biography, which covers the rise and relevance of the novel and its community of booklovers in a delightful tale, not at all twice-told, that reminds us of exactly why we read.

Wall Street Journal - Brenda Wineapple

The Novel is one of the most important works of both literary history and criticism to be published in the last decade… The reason Schmidt’s book is so effective and important has to do with its approach, its scope, and its artistry, which all come together to produce a book of such varied usefulness, such compact wisdom, that it’ll take a lot more than a few reviews to fully understand its brilliant contribution to literary study… Here, collected in one place, we have the largest repository of the greatest novelists’ opinions and views on other novelists. It would take the rest of us going through countless letters and essays and interviews with all these writers to achieve such a feat. Schmidt has done us all a great, great favor… Maybe the most complete history of the novel in English ever produced… [A] multitudinous achievement… Schmidt [is] an uncannily astute critic… Schmidt’s masterpiece… Schmidt’s writing is a triumph of critical acumen and aesthetic elegance… [The Novel] is a monumental achievement, in its historical importance and its stylistic beauty… It is, itself, a work of art, just as vital and remarkable as the many works it chronicles.

The Millions - Jonathan Russell Clark

Show[s] how much is to be gained by the application of unfettered intelligence to the study of literature… Schmidt seems to have read every novel ever published in English… This is as sensitive an appreciation of Fielding’s style (all those essayistic addresses to the reader that introduce each of the eighteen books of Tom Jones) as any I’ve ever read. And what Schmidt does for Fielding he does equally well for Ford Madox Ford, Mary Shelley, and (by my count) about 347 others… [Schmidt’s] sensibilities are wholly to be trusted.

Open Letters Monthly - Stephen Akewy

Given the fluidity with which [Schmidt] ranges across the canon (as well as quite a bit beyond it), one is tempted to say that he carries English literature inside his head as if it were a single poem, except that there are sections in The Novel on the major Continental influences, too—the French, the Russians, Cervantes, Kafka—so it isn’t only English. If anyone’s up for the job, it would seem to be him… Take a breath, clear the week, turn off the WiFi, and throw yourself in… The book, at its heart, is a long conversation about craft. The terms of discourse aren’t the classroom shibboleths of plot, character, and theme, but language, form, and address. Here is where we feel the force of Schmidt’s experience as an editor and a publisher as well as a novelist… Like no other art, not poetry or music on the one hand, not photography or movies on the other, [a novel] joins the self to the world, puts the self in the world, does the deep dive of interiority and surveils the social scope… [Novels] are also exceptionally good at representing subjectivity, at making us feel what it’s like to inhabit a character’s mind. Film and television, for all their glories as narrative and visual media, have still not gotten very far in that respect, nor is it easy to see how they might… Schmidt reminds us what’s at stake, for novels and their intercourse with selves. The Novel isn’t just a marvelous account of what the form can do; it is also a record, in the figure who appears in its pages, of what it can do to us. The book is a biography in that sense, too. Its protagonist is Schmidt himself, a single reader singularly reading.

The Atlantic - William Deresiewicz

The title and the length of Michael Schmidt’s book promise something more than an annotated chronology. This is not a rise of, nor an aspects of, nor even a theory of, the novel, but a nuanced account of the development of an innovative form… Schmidt’s preferences are strong and warm. He admires a range of authors from Thomas Love Peacock and Walter Scott to Anthony Burgess and Peter Carey… The Novel: A Biography incidentally provides the material for one to make a personal re-reading list.

Times Literary Supplement - Lindsay Duguid

A wonderful, opinionated and encyclopedic book that threatens to drive you to a lifetime of rereading books you thought you knew and discovering books you know you don’t.

New Statesman - Rowan Williams

[Schmidt] is a wonderful and penetrating critic, lucid and insightful about a dizzying range of novelists.

Daily Beast - Nick Romeo

[Schmidt] has written what claims to be a ‘biography’ of the novel. It isn’t. It’s something much more peculiar and interesting… Illuminating and fascinating. And because the book makes no pretense to objectivity, the prose is engaging and witty… [A] marvelous book… If there is a future for encyclopedic books ‘after’ the internet, this is a model of how it should be done.

Times Higher Education - Robert Eaglestone

I was left breathless at Michael Schmidt’s erudition and voracious appetite for reading.

The Tablet - Alexander Lucie-Smith

Rare in contemporary literary criticism is the scholar who betrays a love for literature… How refreshing, then, to encounter in Michael Schmidt’s The Novel: A Biography not a theory of the novel, but a life. And what a life it is… Schmidt arranges his examination both chronologically and thematically, taking into account the influences and developments that have shaped the novel for hundreds of years. The Novel is at once encyclopedia, history, and ‘biography.’ …[Schmidt’s] lyrical prose weaves together literary analysis, biography, and cultural criticism… Another delightful aspect of The Novel consists of the surprising and insightful connections Schmidt finds among writers… The Novel is more revelatory (and interesting) than a merely chronological account would be.

Books & Culture - Karen Swallow Prior

In recent years, while the bookish among us were bracing ourselves for the bookless future, stowing our chapbooks and dog-eared novellas in secret underground bunkers, the poet and scholar Michael Schmidt was writing a profile of the novel. The feat itself is uplifting. Bulky without being dense or opaque, The Novel: A Biography belongs on the shelf near Ian Watt’s lucid The Rise of the Novel and Jane Smiley’s livelier user manual, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. Taking as his guide The March of Literature, Ford Madox Ford’s classic tour through the pleasures of serious reading, Schmidt steers clear of the canon wars and their farcical reenactments. He doesn’t settle the question of whether Middlemarch makes us better people. He isn’t worried about ‘trigger warnings.’ And he doesn’t care that a Stanford professor is actively not reading books. Instead, with humor and keen insight, he gives us the story of the novel as told by practitioners of the form. The book is meant for ordinary readers, whose interest is not the death of theory or the rise of program fiction, but what Schmidt calls, in a memorable line, ‘our hunger for experience transformed.’

Los Angeles Review of Books - Drew Calvert

Michael Schmidt is one of literature’s most ambitious champions, riding out against the naysayers, the indifferent, and the purse holders, determined to enlarge readers’ vision and rouse us all to pay attention. Were it not for his rich and adventurous catalogue of publications at Carcanet Press, and the efforts of a few other brave spirits at other small presses (such as Bloodaxe Books) the landscape of poetry in the U.K. would be depopulated, if not desolate. He has now turned his prodigious energies to telling the story of the novel’s transformation through time: a Bildungsroman of the genre from a persevering and unappeasable lover.

Marina Warner

[Schmidt] reads so intelligently and writes so pungently… Schmidt’s achievement: a herculean literary labor, carried off with swashbuckling style and critical aggression.

John Sutherland

The Novel: A Biography is a marvel of sustained attention, responsiveness, tolerance and intelligence… It is Schmidt’s triumph that one reads on and on without being bored or annoyed by his keen generosity. Any young person hot for literature would be wise to take this fat, though never obese, volume as an all-in-one course in how and what to read. Then, rather than spend three years picking up the opinions of current academics, the apprentice novelist can learn a foreign language or two, listen, look and then go on his or her travels, wheeling this book as vade mecum.

Literary Review - Frederic Raphael

I toast a certainty—the long and fruitful life of poet, critic, and scholar Michael Schmidt’s book, The Novel: A Biography. Readers for generations will listen through Schmidt’s ear to thrilling conversations, novelist to novelist, and walk guided by Schmidt through these 1200 pages of his joyful and wise understanding.

Stanley Moss

04/01/2014
Schmidt (poetry, Univ. of Glasgow; writer in residence, St. John's Coll., Cambridge; Lives of the Poets) presents what he terms a "brief" life of the novel in English, from its origins in the 14th century through 2000. Included are writers from virtually all English-speaking countries and chapters on French and Russian novelists whose works have influenced those in English. The editions Schmidt examines "ask to be reread and become living parts of memory that affect how we hear, speak, see, feel, and act"; he also discusses books that provide sources and contexts for them or that imitate them. The content consists largely of quotations from later authors commenting on earlier ones to whom they feel a connection e.g., Muriel Spark on Mary Shelley and D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville. Biographical details are included to the extent that they are germane to the writer's work. The volume also includes a detailed time line of major authors and their works from the 13th through 20th centuries. VERDICT The breadth and length of this book limit its interest to serious students of literature. However, the lack of citations for works quoted and of a bibliography are drawbacks for those wishing to do further research.—Denise J. Stankovics, formerly with Rockville P.L., CT

Library Journal

2014-02-13
Writers, reading, invigorate the novel. That is both the theme and plot of Schmidt's (Poetry/Glasgow Univ.; The Stories of My Life, 2013, etc.) encyclopedic compendium tracing the novel over 700 years. The author sees the genre as alive and evolving, capacious enough to include such writers as Mulk Raj Anand, an Indian émigré to England, whose work Schmidt does not much admire; the prolific Irish writer Ethel Mannin; and Guyanese writer Wilson Harris, read by Derek Walcott and Anthony Burgess but not many others. Schmidt considers his subjects more or less chronologically for half the book, gathering contemporaries who read one another: Hawthorne, Melville and Stowe, for example; and Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Charles Brockden Brown and other practitioners of what Schmidt calls "The Eerie," as distinct from, in another chapter, the Brontë sisters and their Gothic romances. The second half of the book is impressionistic, as Schmidt creates "a dialogue" among writers and their works. A chapter on "Portraits and Caricatures of the Artist" includes Joyce, Beckett, Burgess and Barthelme; "Tone and Register" ranges from Virginia Woolf to Jeanette Winterson. Along the way, readers will learn that Woolf was dismissive of Maria Edgeworth, whom she considered too demure; that Gertrude Stein could not abide James Joyce; and that pretty much everyone was in thrall to Henry James—Truman Capote praised him as "the maestro of the semicolon." As commodious as this book is, at more than 1,100 pages, the selections and groupings seem arbitrary, as does Schmidt's selection of writers' comments. Writers are famously voracious readers, and some were frequent reviewers; often, they mention novels in their letters, memoirs and diaries. Schmidt, apparently, has read them all. "I set out to write this book without an overarching theory of the novel," Schmidt admits. "I had no point to prove." He does, however, prove his wide-ranging reading tastes, his ability to weave a colorful literary tapestry and his conviction that the novel is irrepressible.

Kirkus Reviews