In the eyes of other nations, Britain was a colonial, maritime, and mercantile country, whose still strong interests in Europe were expressed largely culturally. This perception made the Enlightenment a broadly recognizable movement, carried on over national boundaries and concerned with ideas such as ‘the modern’, of religious toleration, of progress, of the ‘science of man’ so strongly supported by David Hume, and of human (or rather, white and masculine) dignity. It self-consciously located itself geographically in Europe and chronologically in ‘the modern age’, which, after much debate in the early part of the century, it saw as superior to that of the Greeks and Romans, in spite of their immense cultural legacy, which was shared by all Europeans. Yet in the end, this chapter argues, in spite of a shared ancient legacy, Britain remained pulled in two directions, the colonial and imperial on the one hand, and the European on the other.

This chapter explores the uneasy relationship between Gulliver’s Travels and scholarship on the development of the English novel during the eighteenth century. The chapter argues that to approach the miscellaneous Gulliver’s Travels with a rigid and absolute conception of genre is to overlook Swift’s engagement with a range of new and old fictional modes. Placing Swift in context means recognising the doubtful applicability to Gulliver of retrospectively formulated assumptions about the novel, including consistency of character. The final section of the chapter looks beyond Gulliver to consider the novelistic qualities of A Tale of a Tub and the lesser-known Memoirs of Capt. John Creichton.

Understanding contemporary African American literature, this chapter argues, requires accounting for the rich, multifaceted dialogue between Black literary production and the visual arts. This chapter traces what Toni Morrison called the “alliances and alignments” between literature and the other arts by analyzing the aesthetics and themes of contemporary African American writing and examining the cross-arts influences that shaped it. The dialogue between African American literature and visual culture is part of a much longer tradition, and contemporary writers have built on many earlier precedents. But this chapter also unpacks how important historical changes, including developments in media technology and the rise of Black art institutions, have generated new and more numerous intersections between Black literary and artistic cultures since the 1970s. Focusing on three key spaces that provided material support and thematic inspiration for Black writers’ experiments with visual art – the home, museum, and university – this chapter examines how authors working in a range of literary genres, including novels, poetry, plays, screenplays, memoirs, and essays, engaged with a variety of visual arts, including painting, film, sculpture, and photography. The influences and aesthetics of visual culture, the chapter shows, powerfully infuse the work of many writers today.

My introduction makes four closely related arguments: that the promise functions as the governing trope of James’s work, that James rearranges the moral landscape of the nineteenth-century novel, that the depictions of promise-giving in James’s fiction challenge a number of moral philosophy’s accounts of the nature of obligation, and that the relation between morality and literature is better posed in terms of form than in terms of content. I explore a range of ethical dilemmas posed by philosophers working in moral philosophy, speech act theory, and the philosophy of identity. In addition I sketch out a short history of the nineteenth-century novel, focusing on the centrality of the promise to British, French, and American writers.

While Robinson Crusoe has been dramatized many times, Defoe often expressed suspicion of theatre. In The Family Instructor (1715), Defoe explores theatre-going as a gateway to other sins and a form of frivolity. The Fortunate Mistress (1724) depicts theatricality as part of elite corruption and an expression of the heroine’s deceptive practices. While including such versions of antitheatricality in such narratives, Defoe nevertheless weaves theatrical techniques into his own writing and does not engage in the passionate hostility to the stage that we see in some of the religious moralists of his time.

This chapter maps the literary terrain that Defoe’s novels entered into and considers his position in literary history as the so-called father of the English novel. While Defoe would come to be associated with the emergence of a new style of realist fiction, he draws on, combines, and exploits the audience for popular generic forms, including romances, travel and adventure tales, romans à clef, pirate chronicles, jest books, collections of anecdotes, and criminal biographies. Extending his non-fictional work, Defoe experimented with narrative strategies to capture everyday experience – an artistic aim we now associate with various forms of realism. Provocative from the start, Defoe’s novels earned detractors and defenders but were recognized as central to the English canon as early as the turn of the nineteenth century. The chapter traces Defoe’s significance to the work of both practitioners and scholars of the novel form, including Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee.

This chapter examines what ‘popular’ and ‘fiction’ may have meant to Defoe before ‘popular fiction’ was a generic category, and then looks at Defoe’s own fictions as an anxious attempt to avoid alignment with those established forms of literature known and demonized as ‘romances’ and ‘novels’. Defoe takes the sex out and puts the ‘history’ in, along with a large moral dose of religious prophylaxis; the whore biography and criminal/pirate life were alike turned into moralistic stories of economic redemption. Yet, given his status as a businessman and exile from elite literary circles, Defoe’s resistance to popular fiction was ambivalent, and he was always aware of the supplementary pleasures of his texts. The individual survival stories, with their incident-rich, class-dissolving, non-classical mode of contemporary, evolving prose, were of high price but often rendered ‘popular’ by the publishing industry itself, which filleted them for chapbook consumption by any literate person.

This chapter considers the place of Ishiguro’s work within the novel tradition. It traces Ishiguro’s dialogue with the novel form, as this extends from Artist of the Floating World to Klara and the Sun, in order to examine the means by which he adapts the tradition to his own ends. The chapter begins and concludes with a reading of Klara and the Sun that focuses on the role of imitation. How far can Klara, the ‘artificial friend’, be regarded as a copy of an existing form of life, and how far does she manifest a new mode of being? And how does Ishiguro adapt the apparatuses of the novel in order to explore the difference, between the imitation of an existing life and the creation, in prose, of an unprecedented one, a fictional life without a model in the world?

“The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and demonstrate what reading an Australian novel looks like in practice.”

This chapter contests the prevailing interpretation of the post-Mabo turn as a decisive new era in Australian cultural history. While the Mabo High Court decision of 1992 was an important milestone in struggles for Indigenous land rights, the insistence on this date as a literary periodization neglects the continuities in settler culture that still structure settler fiction in Australia. Alternatively, recent First Nations fiction suggests possibilities within and outside dominant paradigms of legality.

The introduction to the volume situates surrealism in relation to theories and historiographies of the novel, noting ways in which the surrealist novel both fits into and diverges from these, and addresses tensions and contradictions generated by the surrealist use of the novel form. It provides a historical context to the development of the surrealist novel across the globe, and discusses the ways in which the surrealist novel has influenced literary forms and styles such as the nouveau roman, the postmodern, as well as the magical realist novel. Moreover, the introduction provides a rationale for the structure of the volume, and a general discussion of notable themes, techniques, and formal specificities of the surrealist novel.

One can ascribe a double origin to surrealism in 1924, André Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism and Louis Aragon’s A Wave of Dreams. If one can see these texts as a double manifesto recapitulating previous experiments and launching a programme, they also plant the seeds for a later divergence. I locate the roots of the breakup between Aragon and Breton less in their politics than in opposed conceptions about the role of the novel and its power to explore the unconscious. Such a divergence is founded upon different interpretations of Freud’s concept of the unconscious. The two founders of surrealism could not agree about the place of a collective unconscious in a surrealist mythology, which can be verified by comparing Anicet and The Paris Peasant on the one hand, and Nadja on the other. I conclude by returning to Walter Benjamin’s critical assessment of surrealism. Halfway between Breton and Aragon, Benjamin identified some pitfalls in a surrealist mythology of the unconscious but intuited what could be gained from a writing capable of exploring reality and surreality together.

In “Narrating Nature,” Erin James considers how modern literature and theory grapple with the broader timescales, planetary conceptions of space, and inhuman perspectives that representations of climate change demand. Focusing on the “unnatural nature” of climate change, James undertakes a narratological analysis two recent “cli-fi” novels, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves. Maintaining a pedagogical emphasis, the chapter foregrounds strategies teachers can use to help students understand and write about climate change. The chapter ultimately considers how narrative can both perpetuate and subvert dominant ideologies about nature and how changing nature is changing the texture of modern narratives.

This chapter outlines the rise and (partial) fall of the mainstream English-language literary novel since WWII. The heights of success of the literary novel required that readers have leisure, focus, and access to public institutions that support literary study and activity. After WWII, literary work was supported by the surge in university enrollments built upon the postwar period’s remarkable economic dynamism, which afforded state-supported higher education and high rates of secure employment. In more recent years, however, austerity governments increasingly defund humanities education and literary arts programming. Students and aspiring writers, indebted and anxious about pathways to employment, are induced to avoid literary study and work, to be risk-averse and market-facing; and people simply do not feel compelled to spend what little they have for entertainment on expensive books. The avowedly literary branch of the mainstream industry has been contracting for these reasons, while other forms of reading and writing cultures (for instance, self-publishing and texts designed for smartphones) have emerged into a more dominant position.

This chapter explores the relationship between religion and “the novel” by focusing on a cross-section of religious questions having to do with belonging (domestic, national, global) and identity. It begins with a consideration the Evangelical Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809), moves to a cluster of novels that contemplated domestic religious differences in the form of Catholics and Jews, and concludes with a shift outside the geographical boundaries of the United Kingdom and Ireland to examine early novelistic responses to overseas missionary movements, which raised challenging questions about empire, race, and religious community.

This chapter is about sensibility, which is the term that was commonly used in the second half of the eighteenth century to refer to a special capacity to respond with sensitivity to one’s environment. Colloquially understood as the heightened responsiveness of feeling or emotion, sensibility – in cultural, literary, artistic, historical, social, philosophical, and political contexts – reached far beyond what either of these more familiar terms convey. Eighteenth-century thinking about sensibility, in all of its complexity, remains deeply relevant to twenty-first century theories of affect, feeling, and emotion, and provides robust resources for, and in some cases correctives to, current theoretical and philosophical thought.

Modernity is often defined as the category that by definition excludes Indigenous people. We could say the same for the modernism, the cultural movement that came into being precisely as a modality of reimaging the future. This essay explores how reimagining Native Americans was not only central for writers during what Michael Denning refers to as the "third wave of modernism" from the late 1920s to the Cold War, but also how Native American modernists imagined themselves within the new emergent forms of modernity. Modernist Native American writers John Joseph Mathews’ and D'Arcy McNickle's touchstone novels, Sundown and The Surrounded, deployed many of the generic tropes of modernism: alienation, hybrid forms, ambiguity, and unreliable narration to express an ambivalence about an emergent modernity. Rather than read the Indigenous as "outside" of modernity, Mathews and McNickle serve to remind us of how Native American modernists complexly engaged with the emergent possibilities of modernist futuricity.