Suzanne Flynn, Associate Professor of English

In this new Next Page column, Suzanne Flynn, Associate Professor of English, confesses which of the “classics” she hasn’t read, shares which Victorian poets and novelists are among her favorites, and explains how her students connect with literature from the 19th century

Quoting Shakespeare in the British Novel from Dickens to Wodehouse

Novelists heralded as Victorian Shakespeares frequently navigated the varied nineteenth-century practices of Shakespeare quotation (in the classroom in compilation books, in stage spoofs) to construct the relationship between narrator and character, and to negotiate the dialogue between Shakespeare\u27s voice and the voice of the novel. This chapter looks at three novelists whose practices intersect and contrast: George Eliot, who resists the Bardolatrous imputation of a Shakespearean character\u27s wisdom to its author by distinguishing her own characters\u27 inept Shakespeare quotations from her narrative voice; Thomas Hardy, who claims the authority of Shakespearean pastoral, regional language against the glib quotations of his more cosmopolitan characters; and a latter-day Victorian, P.G. Wodehouse, who plays the irreverent, defamiliarising gambits of Victorian Shakespeare burlesques against the educational and commonplace authority that Shakespeare quotations accrue

The Post-War Novel in Crisis: Three Perspectives

Three major novelists of the period following the second world war, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and V.S. Naipaul, have pondered the question of why the post-war novel is unable to achieve the heights of its nineteenth-century predecessors. Each of these three writers has suggested remedies, to which they have aspired with varying degrees of success. And each of them offers, implicitly or explicitly, different reasons for the change. In this essay I will evaluate their arguments and attempt to account for some of the factors which give rise to the consciousness that they are different in some qualitative way from their predecessors. I will also discuss the effect such attitudes may have on their own work

Barbauld's Richardson and the canonisation of personal character

In The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (1804), Anna Letitia Barbauld set out to assure readers that the novelist’s personal character (as displayed in his letters) corresponded to his authorial moral character (as inferred through his novels) in order to present him as an appropriate father of the modern British novel – a process I call the “canonisation of private character.” To that end, Barbauld’s editorial work presented Richardson as a benevolent patriarchal figure whose moral authority over the domestic life of his extended family guaranteed the morality of his novels and of his personal character. As my case study of Richardson’s correspondence with Sarah Wescomb shows, Barbauld’s interventions accordingly muted challenges to Richardson’s authority on questions of paternal control or filial obedience. Life writing, textual criticism, and literary history were therefore so intimately intertwined in Barbauld’s treatment of Richardson and his writings that they mutually constituted and sustained each other. Her contributions to the elevation and institution of novels as a national literary genre – in the Correspondence as well as in her later prefaces to The British Novelists (1810) – accordingly should be read in conjunction with her biographical elevation and canonisation of Richardson as the first properly moral, modern novelist

British literature since World War II : a selected bibliography of secondary sources with special reference to drama/theatre and narrative prose (period covered : mid-1940 to 2000)

British literature since world war II : a selected bibliography of secundary sources with special reference to drama/theatre and narrative prose (period covered : mid-1940 to 2000). Part I: Integrated alphabetical index. Part II: Specific bibliographies (as to author and subject

Adam Bede, realism, the past, and readers in 1859

This article gives an account of the immediate publication context of George Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede, in terms of competing opportunities for leisure, anxieties about the reading of fiction, the publishing industry, and the social and political context of February 1859. It examines the way in which the novel engages with its first readers, specifically through its treatment of the experience of reading fiction, and the ways in which Adam Bede differs from readers’ previous experiences. The article argues that the novel’s impact is determined by its engagement with the past of its setting, and by the ways it which it encourages a historically-nuanced appreciation in its readers, and that these factors are integral to Eliot’s articulating a new form of realist fiction

“An appreciative and grateful author”: Edith Wharton and the House of Macmillan

This essay is the first piece of scholarship to examine the relationship between the expatriate American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937) and her chief British publisher, Macmillan and Co. Entirely original analysis draws extensively upon the author/publisher correspondence held in the Macmillan Archive in the British Library, and challenges existing readings of the firm's handling of women novelists in the period 1900-1930

Know Your Audience: Middlebrow aesthetic and literary positioning in the fiction of P.G. Wodehouse

This essay strives to explain Wodehouse’s status as a popular writer, whose work is read with enjoyment by academics, critics and the general reader alike, as resulting from his particular positioning within the literary field, scrutinizing his relationship to both popular commercial fiction and avant-garde literary output. It argues that Wodehouse as a writer of enduring popularity and yet non-canonical status fits in with a range of critical discourses of the middlebrow, both modern and contemporary