The twentieth century has seen perhaps more drastic changes in literature than any other century, and the novel has dominated the literary scene more than ever. The English-language novel has repeatedly reinvented itself and its form throughout the century, influenced by the trauma of two world wars, the loss of the British Empire, and the influx of perspectives from postcolonial authors. In A Reader’s Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel in Britain, Randall Stevenson charts the complicated course the novel has taken over the past century, showing how it relates to the cataclysmic historical events of recent history.
Stevenson begins with the Edwardian period, explaining its literature both as a reaction against Victorian constraints and as an attempt to deal with the continuing difficulties of the industrial revolution, the ominous growth of Germany’s strength, and the loss of familial and societal stability. However, even during this time, not all writers agreed that these concerns should be the focus of literature. Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Henry James criticized their contemporaries for focusing too much on the material and societal aspects of life, and not enough on human nature (22).

After looking at James, Joseph Conrad, and E.M. Forster as precursors to modernist narrative techniques, Stevenson devotes his most in-depth chapter to the modernist novel, introducing the theories of writing that underscore the work of Woolf, Lawrence, and James Joyce. The modernist movement is separated historically from the Edwardians by World War I, and several facets of literary modernism were strongly influenced by the devastating psychological effects of the war. No longer finding it viable to hope in the state, social order, or even religion in the post-war world, the modernists found purpose in art and personal vision (30), seen clearly in Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Modernism also brought stylistic innovations to narrative form and structure, especially the tendency to deviate from chronological storytelling toward a fragmented approach in which form became intrinsic to meaning. Stevenson argues that modernism informs the novel even now, and that understanding it and its contributions to novelistic form is imperative for understanding the twentieth-century novel in general (6).

However, modernism was not universally praised at the time (52-53). Some contemporary critics felt the modernists’ tendency to focus on the inner life of individuals was an inappropriate denial of the social problems Britain faced moving into the Depression of the 1930s. As memories of more peaceful Edwardian times receded, 1930s authors dealt with a world that had always been shadowed by the threat of war, political strife, and poverty. Stevenson suggests that the general tendency was to move “away from personal or aesthetic interests and towards broader social concern, often reflected in realist, even documentary styles” (59), rather than remain aloof from societal issues and turn inward, as the modernists had. Although writers like George Orwell, Christopher Isherwood, and Grahame Greene employ modernist techniques, they put them to a more politically and socially conscious end.

Stevenson highlights three major novelistic tendencies of the World War II era: the attempt to recreate the battlefield experience through a disorienting and fragmented form (75-78); the use of fantasy to “provide contexts in which contemporary anxieties could be clearly and vividly examined” (80); and looking back at pre-war innocence as an escape, but also to search for causes of the current disillusionment. By the 1950s, the novel had settled into half-hearted rebellion that led merely to reconciliation with society, tending to be conservative in both values and style (95). But predictions of the death of the novel (96) were proven wrong by the explosion of postmodern forms beginning in the 1960s.

Stevenson notes that the influence of Woolf and the modernists began to be felt again in the 1960s, as “many novelists… rejected in their turn [the 1950s] new conservatism and reluctance with experimentation or innovation in form.” (104) Writers increasingly felt that traditional language and narrative techniques were inadequate to express reality, which led to a self-conscious fragmentation of narrative and style. Stevenson shows that in literature, unlike some disciplines, postmodernism really appropriates and goes beyond modernism rather than rejecting it (112). Indeed, Stevenson connects modernism and postmodernism directly through Irish writers James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O’Brien, whose work he sees as “a postmodern paradigm, a further prophecy of the self-reflexive foregrounding of fiction-making, language and representation which has become the distinguishable characteristic of postmodernism.” (114)

Another characteristic of postmodernism is inclusivity, which Stevenson looks at as he deals with literature’s trajectory toward the year 2000. The British Empire dispersed the English language and people throughout the world, and also brought the descendents of English colonizers and indigenous peoples back to Britain, where their multi-cultural outlook spawned a slew of postcolonial literature. Writers like Chinua Achebe, Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo, and Salman Rushdie write from a perspective that involves both British culture and their respective African, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian backgrounds. Stevenson locates much of recent literary innovation in the shores of the former British Empire; in fact, he finds that innovation in the British novel has often come from the margins of society throughout the century, especially from Ireland, a much older seat of British colonization (137).

Stevenson states that “literature not only reflects but seeks to compensate for the problems and anguish of history, reshaping in imagination what is lost or intractable in fact” (127), speaking here specifically of the effects of the loss of Empire on British consciousness and its literature, but the quote also applies to the effects of World War I, the 1930s depression, World War II, the baby-boomer era of the 1950s, the social revolutions of the 1960s, and recent globalization. Despite Britain’s loss of political power, its language has become dominant in many ways around the globe, and Stevenson hopes the future will bring even greater vitality to literature in English, whether from the island herself, or from the newer voices of her former colonies (141-142).

Although Stevenson’s book necessarily and explicitly (59) over-generalizes, he does a very good job at identifying major trends and their historical influences. He explains clearly and concisely the historical background and literary innovations, giving enough particular examples for readers unfamiliar with the specific works to keep up. My only quibble is a slight imbalance between the first and second halves of the book. Appropriately, he gives a lot of time to modernism: part of his purpose is to show “the recent and contemporary as a legacy of the now-established classics of the twentieth century—those of the modernist period in particular.” (6) However, after the relative depth of coverage from 1900-1950, the rest of the book feels rushed. He involves more writers, and gives each one only a paragraph or two. This gives a great sense of the diversity of those decades, but I wish he had taken time and space to develop them a bit further. Aside from that, A Reader’s Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel in Britain is an excellent overview of a complex century, connecting literature to its historical climate in a readable, concise, and illuminating way. Stevenson provides a good foundation for a beginning study of twentieth century English literature, leaving his reader hungry for more.

This review originated in September 2006 for British Literature from 1900 to the Present at Baylor University.

In the years since E.M. Forster published his novel Howards End in 1910, critics have generally agreed that his style and technique is masterful, though most believe his social critique is less than successful. The most salient discussions of Forster’s work, found in Frederick C. Crews E.M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism and Wilfred Stone’s The Cave and the Mountain, conform to this model. Both Crews and Stone argue that Forster’s failure to provide a coherent answer to the social problems outlined in Howards End constitute a failure of the novel as a whole. In this book-length study of Howards End, Alistair Duckworth takes slightly different approach: he does not deny that Forster’s novel lacks a unified vision, but rather, he sees Forster’s refusal to suggest a definite answer to the problems of his time as the guiding principle of Howards End.

He opens with a brief description of the very real social and political troubles facing England in the Edwardian period, from the conflict over Irish Home Rule to labor disputes to the beginning of the arms race with Germany. Liberalism itself was unable to cope with the pressures of the time, splintering into radical and moderate factions; some liberals concerned themselves more with economic laissez-faire (like the Wilcoxes of the novel), some more with social agendas to help the poor (like the Schlegels). Duckworth suggests that Forster’s acute awareness of the limits of liberalism kept him from being comfortable with siding too strongly for either the Schlegels or the Wilcoxes. However, he does not see this position as a weakness of the novel (as Virginia Woolf notably did in a 1927 Atlantic Monthly article), but rather believes it is Forster’s intention to elicit dialogue among his readers: “Forster’s achievement as a social critic is not, however, to have proposed solutions to social problems but to have put significant topics on the table for his readers to discuss and debate” (129).

Taking this stance, Duckworth considers the ways in which Forster’s narrative technique encourages a dialogic approach, by allowing the seams of the novel’s structure to show in the narrator’s multi-voiced role, the juxtaposition of different genres (history, social discourse, dramatic dialogue, comedy of manners, tragedy), and the use of characters and situations on both realistic and symbolic levels. He articulates both the deftness of Forster’s plotting as well as its obvious service to Forster’s ends: the convenience of the Hamar Bryce character (the tenant who clears out of Howards End just in time for Margaret to need it), the realistically improbable but symbolically necessary connection between Henry and Jacky Bast, and Leonard’s death, triply caused by his own weakness (his heart), Schlegelian culture (the bookshelf), and Wilcoxian aggression (Charles).

Duckworth spends one very good chapter discussing Forster’s grasp of conversational style and his use of speech patterns for characterization—a technique Duckworth thinks works quite well for the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, but falls short of the mark when it comes to the lower-class Basts. Throughout, Duckworth considers Forster’s characterizations of Leonard and Jacky to be merely adequate, probably due to Forster’s own unfamiliarity with those on the brink of the abyss. The chapter on conversation and the one on the narrator work closely together to support Duckworth’s thesis that Howards End is a heteroglossic novel, wherein some voices are preferred to others, but none prevails—not even Margaret’s or the narrator’s, whose consciousnesses closely reflect, but perhaps do not perfectly transmit, Forster’s own views. The narrator himself takes on a number of different roles and voices, from the elegiac to the playfully interpolative. Duckworth also points out what is a bit less obvious: that the narrator does not address only one reader, but does, at one point, explicitly addresses at least two—when he recounts Leonard’s overnight walk: “The adventurer, also, is reticent, and it is an adventure for a clerk to walk for a few hours in darkness. You may laugh at him, you who have slept nights on the veldt, with your rifle beside you and all the atmosphere of adventure past. And you also may laugh who think adventures silly.” Thus, Forster invites us “to view both narrator and reader as plural entities” (118), adding to the dialogic nature of his work.

Throughout, Duckworth considers Forster to be Jane Austen’s heir to the comedy of manners, which is unsurprising considering that much of Duckworth’s own work has been on Austen. He is, in fact, the only critic I have seen explicitly the very obvious similarity between Margaret and Helen Schlegel and Austen’s Elinor and Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility. His connections to Austen’s style are well-made and accord with Forster’s obvious respect for Austen as displayed in Aspects of the Novel. Duckworth’s use of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogics works quite well when applied to Forster and rescues Howards End from the somewhat harsh pronouncements of Stone and Crews. Overall, Duckworth’s analysis of Howards End is even-handed and helpful, including many insights that have not been made elsewhere.

One wishes only that he had finished his book with as strong a chapter as the ones on plot, conversation and the narrator. Instead, though he entitles the last chapter “Only Connect…” it barely connects to the rest of the book, being little more than a random assortment of assertions about Forster’s allusions, his Austenian irony, his homosexuality, the inability of a single reading of Howards End to comprehend everything in it, and finally, a reflexive paragraph on Duckworth’s perception of himself as a Forsterian critic on the “fag-end of academic humanism” (137). Duckworth’s final words proclaim Howards End as “a diminished community, but one in which the Schlegel sisters, faithful to their father’s ideals, are attempting to ‘rekindle the light within’” (139), a true enough sentiment and kinder than many critics have been to the final scenes of the novel, but it is a rather bland and uncompelling ending to Duckworth’s own book. However, despite this flawed finale, Duckworth’s volume is a welcome addition to Forster scholarship, providing an insightful and readable analysis of what some consider to be Forster’s best novel.

This review originated in December 2006 for British Literature from 1800 to the Present at Baylor University.

The London stage in the late 16th and early 17th centuries was a space filled with much controversy and much variety. There are, of course, hundreds of books devoted to Shakespeare, dozens to Marlowe and Jonson and others; there are many books devoted to early modern English drama’s relationship to religion (such as Clifford Davidson’s History, Religion, and Violence) and to society, as well as the era’s stagecraft (the collection Staged Properties, for example), and the texts themselves. In the new collection of essays Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, editors Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield bring together twenty-seven essays, most of which deal with a specific play and a specific aspect of the early modern historical and literary period that that play particularly illuminates (the first two explore general topics of authorship and acting companies).

The purpose of the collection, as stated in the preface, is “to serve as a complementary text in a college or university course in Renaissance drama, undergraduate or graduate” (v). Toward this end, the essays are arranged chronologically, presumably to be read along with the plays being studied in class. However, despite this purpose, Early Modern English Drama often seems unsure of its audience—the introduction and opening essays do a very good job at setting the stage, as it were, for a study of Renaissance drama. The introduction emphasizes the differences between Elizabethan audiences and modern ones, emphasizing the greater physical involvement of early audiences and the controversial nature of the theatre at the time, as opposed to the modern understanding of theatre as “high art.” Wendy Wall’s essay “Dramatic Authorship and Print” points out the difficulty in nailing down the precise texts of early modern plays, given the number of hands they went through before publication, and the expectation that different performances would be somewhat tailored to the actors and the audiences. And Roslyn L. Knutson’s entry “Theatre Companies and Stages” details the often confusing landscape of the playhouses and acting companies themselves, including their many changes of name and venue. Although Knutson tends to get a bit wordy and over-involved at times, these three essays as a whole are a good introduction to the world of early modern theatre and are especially accessible to a student new to that world.

The rest of the essays, however, range wildly from excellent to nearly unreadable, and from very accessible subjects and themes to rather obscure ones, making it difficult to recommend the book unequivocally to either beginning students or advanced ones. Greg Walker provides an intriguing study of the early innovations in Fulgens and Lucres, which is matched by Lucy Munro as she considers generic experimentation in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Garrett A. Sullivan and R.W. Maslen utilize mostly textual criticism to give very good insights into, respectively, Arden of Faversham and its depiction of the early modern household and Twelfth Night’s comedic gender-bending. Many of the essays deal helpfully with contemporary history and society, such as John Gillies’ connection between Tamburlaine and the Renaissance excitement about exploration and conquest, Kristen Poole’s discussion of Dr. Faustus in light of Reformation theology, and a pair of essays by Danielle Clarke and Dympna Callaghan concerning marriage and widowhood in The Tragedy of Mariam and The Duchess of Malfi.

Unfortunately, though many of the essays are quite interesting and helpful, there are enough poorly written and questionably conceived essays to drag the collection down. Some are merely muddled, like Constance Jordan’s “Henry V and the Tudor Monarchy” and Neil Rhodes’ “Hamlet and Humanism.” Others seem to almost entirely forget to include the play which is their subject, such as Katherine Eggers’ “The Alchemist and Science,” while still others flit from point to point without ever really addressing the subject of their title, like Karen Newman’s “A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and London,” which does a fine job of discussing the play, but only throws in London in the last paragraph. I nearly gave up reading Gail Kern Paster’s discussion of “Bartholomew Fair and the Humoral Body”—if she had a point, she hid it very well.

In the final analysis, Early Modern English Drama has enough strong essays to make it a helpful read, but it is far from a must-have on the Renaissance scholar’s shelf. Likewise, professors teaching Renaissance drama may find a few entries of value for their students, but are unlikely to want to depend on this volume alone. The book does have two strengths: the uniform briefness of the essays (each is roughly ten pages, a nice length), and the concentrated focus of each essay, at least in theory, on one play and one aspect of the play. The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, which is overall very similar in purpose, organizes each essay around a specific issue in drama or society (Playhouses and Players, Drama and Society, Political Drama, Romance and the Heroic Play, Pastiche and Tragicomedy, Comedy, Tragedy, Caroline Drama, Private and Occasional Drama, and so forth), and discusses a multitude of plays within each category. There is an effective broadness to this approach, but the pointedness of Early Modern English Drama is a nice counterpoint to it, and the emphasis each essay places on a specific play yields accessibility and comprehensibility. Well, disregarding those two or three essays which remain incomprehensible anyway.

This book review originated in November 2006 as an assignment for Bibliography and Research Methods at Baylor University.