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The novel-criticism of Henry James has been allowed to overshadow the achievement of his English contemporaries, whose essays, letters, and periodical-articles show a highly articulate concern with many of the most fundamental problems of novel-writing. This study examines the whole body of critical opinion over the years 1860-1900, both in its detailed expression and in its general movements. The status of the novel as a genre is hotly debated during the first fifteen years or so from a predominantly moral view-point, and critics show themselves urgently concerned with its vast dominance over the literary scene and its influence on the behaviour of society. The old Evangelical suspicions remain, and those who defend fiction are usually obliged to do so in a utilitarian way, emphasing its provision of noble exerapla and strengthening maxims, and its effect on the imagination and the sympathies, which are the key to a virtuous life. After 1880, the moral respectability of novel-reading is fairly assured, in spite of continuing traces of doubt, and argument over the novel's general position is now concentrated on its claims to offer more than mere relaxation, many holding, to the end of the century, that this is the form's main function, but a growing number (especially among the novelists themselves) stressing, on the contrary, its "seriousness", its philosophic scope, and the imaginative heights to which it can attain. At the same time, the aesthetic status of the novel is slowly changing by the attempts of critics to define it vis-à-vis the other arts, to describe its history and its categories, and to enunciate its own laws, despite the opposition of many who continued to believe in spontaneity and informality. The new devotion by some to craftsmanship and the artistic conscience is the final factor in a status for the novel that remains, even in 1900, controversial and insecure. The central question of the novel's realism or non-realism is resolved for many critics in terms of a simple correspondence with life, a mirroring of normal experience without exaggeration or convention, and, above all, a portrayal of characters which affect the reader as if alive. This is widely challenged, however, sometimes only unconsciously, by the modifications necessary in order to give pleasure, the exclusion of dull or sordid subject-matter, the selection of "agreeable" characters, and an artistic treatment that is generally optimistic and consoling. More consciously, Idealism reveals itself in accounts of the novelist's temperament and imagination as a valid distorting medium, his subjectivity, "vision", or sympathy; and, again, in thoroughly non-Realist descriptions of a transcendental realm of Beauty, or Truth, or Essence, which the novel should represent, sometimes by use of the Type or the Symbol. The structural nature of the form is also used to distinguish it from life, especially with reference to the non-mimetic quality of artistic illusion, vraisemblance and compression. All of these traits, Realist and Idealist, are crystallized in the great disputes of the 'eighties and 'nineties caused by the advent of French Naturalism and the supposedly Realist school of Henry James and W. D. Howells; and proponents of Idealism, an unexpectedly numerous band, express their ideas with enthusiasm in their reactions to the revival of the Romance-form in the last two decades. The novel's representation of reality is also modified in various ways by its embodying various value-judgments, and the necessity for moral didacticism dominates many accounts, especially in the earlier years. The nature of the moral code to be observed by novelists is generally of more interest to critics than the specific manner of its implementation in aesthetic terms, and the values prove to be either vaguely Transcendental - the enshrining of the Moral Ideal - or more Empirical, based on social convention and the Christian tradition. The operation of values and ideas in fiction is usually examined by critics from the standpoint of their effect on the "moral sense" or the emotions of readers, or their origins in the moral nature of the artist himself, and comments on how the novelist's judgments are embodied in his Characterisation or in his use of the convention of Poetic Justice take us only a little nearer to the heart of the problem. Didacticism is also widely attacked, on the grounds that it causes unnaturalness and that values should be in some way dramatised and made inherent, but again, few details are given of this proper method, most accounts, like Leslie Stephen's and Saintsbury's, returning to the moral quality of the writer's imagination. Even enemies of traditional morality, like Pater, Swinburne, Henley, Moore, and Havelock Ellis, confine themselves to demanding fewer moral restrictions for the novel, and none denies - or satisfactorily explains - its essential moral or philosophical relevance. Lastly, novel-critics prove to have much to say on questions of technique, centered on the antinomy between the Novel of Plot and the Novel of Character, the organic unity of a novel, and the various problems of narrative-method. After the early favour given to "Character", a reaction occurs against the excessive character-analysis of the French and American schools, and 'plot' becomes a desirable and much-sought quality. The novelty of Henry James' methods is unappreciated, and the conservatism of novel-theory in this respect is most marked. Constructive unity, on the other hand, is a concept that receives much valuable elaboration, and, under various interpretations, is a reviewers' fetish at all times. The question of Point of View is also well-known to the period, the advantages and disadvantages of Omniscience and Autobiography being fully gone into, and, in one remarkable essay by Vernon Lee, is the subject of a full and intelligent discussion. The ageis criticism of fiction, then, despite its limitations, gives an impression of some width and insight, and, with its many unexpected characteristics, must be regarded as an important sector of Victorian literary theory.

by Christina Lee Ka-pik. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1990. / Bibliography: leaves 163-168. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowedgments --- p.ii / Chapter Chapter1 --- Introducion --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter2 --- Orthodoxy vs Anti-orthodoxy --- p.12 / Chapter Chapter3 --- Historicity vs Fictionalization --- p.52 / Chapter Chapter4 --- Ordinary vs Unexpectedness --- p.97 / Chapter Chapter5 --- Conclusion --- p.151 / Notes to Chapter 1 --- p.156 / Notes to Chapter 2 --- p.157 / Notes to Chapter 3 --- p.160 / Notes to Chapter 4 --- p.161 / Notes to Chapter 5 --- p.162 / Works Cited --- p.163

This study demonstrates that much of the Gothic novel's effect results from the form of the classical tragedy. Experimentation with that form as the basic structure of the novel begins with Horace Walpole, extending through Ann Radcliffe and Charles Maturin. Walpole, the innovator, uses the form--architectonic movements and particularized devices-to bring dramatic action back to a genre which was withering due to Richardson's epistolary structure. The plotting of The Castle of Otranto relies on tragic movement: exposition, complication, minor crisis, incitement of tragic force, climax, catastrophe. Also, to move action, Walpole uses peripeteia and anagnorisis more broadly than a dramatist. Because of his expanded use of the two devices, Walpole adds spectacle or the supernatural to crisis, climax, and catastrophe. Desiring to offset pathos, he creates fear--specifically terror, the fear of death.Ann Radcliffe uses Walpole's strategy in The Italian but modifies the tragic structure somewhat. Hers is a more expansive work than Otranto, and she emphasizes the ironies of her protagonist's decline. Equally important, she uses the true supernatural, she continues experimenting with minor character, and generalizing the use of peripeteia to increase ironic possibilities occurring between characters, characters and narrator, or book and audience. Because these ironies are so much like undercutting, The Italian seems more like a modern novel.Because Charles Robert Maturin was himself a dramatist, the architectonic technique of Melmoth the Wanderer is also tragic. Maturin uses the tragic form recursively, adding bewildering, ambiguous depth to the novel. The many tragedies are interlocked. Individually, each teaches about the human condition. As a whole, the tragedies are Melmoth's hell on earth, though his victims' fleshly tragedies never match his own hopeless spiritual tragedy. Structurally, Maturin uses periketeia and anagnorisis frequently, oftentimes mixing in spectacle and the supernatural. Other major contributions are Maturin's use of a temporally and spatially free protagonist and his emphasis of the fear of eternal damnation. Since that is Melmoth's final lot, the author withholds climax and catastrophe for the novel's end.Thus, the Gothic suggests itself as a source for the "dramatic novels" of later mainstream authors like George Eliot.

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This thesis is the first systematic study of short stories published in the New Statesman [NS] weekly magazine from its foundation in 1913 to 1939. The main question it seeks to address is what type of fiction did a mainstream socialist publication like the NS publish then? By chronologically charting dominant literary figures and themes, the thesis aims to discern significant cultural tendencies and editorial principles of selection. Following Raymond Williams' 'cultural materialism', fiction is read in its relation to social history, as a 'representation of history'. Chapter 1 deals with the foundation of the journal and its first year of publication, mapping out the contradictions between Fabian collectivist ideology and ethical socialism, urban realism and literary Georgianism, country and city. A focus on urban problems of poverty unemployment, philanthropy, and machinofacture is at the heart of the NS's literary concern, in 1913. Chapter 2 focuses on stories published during World War I, and goes up to 1926. It argues that the reality of the War was falsified as a time of rest and relaxation, in line with the journal's political policy of supporting the war effort. The immediate post-war period is read as a time of disappointment and intensified social conflict and struggle. The General Strike of 1926 is a turning point in interwar history. It also ushers in a period of unprecedented cultural activity in the NS. As Chapters 4 and 5 show, the post-Strike period is characterised by the consolidation of the working-class fiction of socialist R. M. Fox; by the rise of the countryside realism of H. E. Bates; and by the rise of the colonial fiction of E. R. Morrough on Egypt (which is examined in the context of Leslie Mitchell's, E. M. Forster's, and William Plomer's responses to empire). Significant contributions by women writers (such as Faith Compton Mackenzie) about travel, duty, and oppression are also made in the late 20s, early 30s. Chapter 6 is dedicated to the magnificent place that Russian fiction occupies in the 30s through the work of Michael Zoshchenko. Though written during the free and experimental 20s, his satiric fiction is published as a sample of Soviet literature of the 30s, thus consolidating the Stalinist line dictated by the political editor, Kingsley Martin, that 'self-criticism' is a central part of Soviet politics and society. Chapter 7 is a tribute to the NS's contribution to reconstructing British realism away from both Victorian moralism and European naturalism. The stories of Bates, V. S. Pritchett, and Peter Chamberlain are dominant, conveying different ways of negotiating the pressures of documentary realism and the political developments of the 30s. Also discussed is the unique modernist contribution of neglected Stella Benson, which presents a strong challenge to the usual representationalism of NS fiction. The concluding chapter reads NS fiction in the whole period between 1913 and 1939 as the cultural expression of the new petty bourgeoisie, especially its progressive, politically and socially engaged side. With its focus on ordinariness and lived experience, and its formal experimentation and innovation, NS fiction exemplifies artistic commitment par excellence, a conscious cultural alignment with the actuality and potentiality of the new petty bourgeoisie.

This thesis examines a practice of nineteenth-century novelists which has often been mentioned by critics but never studied in detail - the setting of much of their work in a period a generation or two before the time of writing. Its main focus is on the fiction of George Eliot set in the recent past: Scenes of Clerical Life (1857-58), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Felix Holt, The Radical (1866), and Middlemarch (1871-72). However I begin by looking briefly at the pioneering novel in the field, Waverley (1814), and go on to discuss three more novels by Scott - Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816) and Redgauntlet (1824) - as well as three by Thackeray: Vanity Fair (1847-48), Pendennis (1848-50) and The Newcomes (1853-55). Since I aim to discover the attitudes these writers adopted to the recent past, and conveyed to their first readers, this study involves discussion not only of the periods in which the novels are set, but also of the periods in which they were written, so as to establish the knowledge and preconceptions which the books' early readers brought to bear on the fiction. Where possible I quote the responses of actual contemporary readers, notably those of the early reviewers. This thesis draws attention to the various functions a setting in the recent past could serve in nineteenth-century fiction: to arouse nostalgic feelings for a vanished but remembered past, or sympathy for the people of the past, to point out that change is sometimes more apparent than real, to comment obliquely on contemporary issues, to highlight the unchanging features of human nature and human predicaments, to examine the role of the individual in effecting change.

This thesis examines the figure of the rake as portrayed in the eighteenth-century English novel, a character strangely neglected in critical studies. The first chapter examines 'libertine' writers of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, notably Bernard de Mandeville; and the dilemma faced by educators of the day over the benefits of virtue on the one hand, and of worldly wisdom on the other. While Mandeville and other lesser defenders of the rake were very much a scandalous minority early in the eighteenth century, it appears that by about mid century a more moderate strain of libertinism received wider, but by no means universal acceptance (Johnson, Chesterfield, Smith, Hume). The second chapter seeks to define the classic conception of the rake as a young upper-class prodigal, and the standard anti-libertine view that gentleman rakes, by their neglect of social and political duties, were a serious threat to established social and political order. The chapter concludes with various examples of the standard rake in minor eighteenth-century novels that both defend and vilify him. Chapters III to V concentrate on each of the three principal novelists of mid century (Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett), and their par- ticular uses of and moral conclusions about the conventional rake. The sixth chapter suggests some conclusions to be drawn, mainly from the previous three chapters, and especially the ways in which Fielding, Richardson and Smollett com- ment on the rakes in each other's fiction; and examines the continued use of the rake topos right to the end of the century and at least into the early nineteenth, in differing types of fiction (novels of manners, of Sentiment and of radical ideas, the Gothic novel).