ISBN-13: 9783110374469 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 613 str.
In the writing of literary history, the 20th-century English novel tends to be customarily divided into modernist fiction up to the end of World War II on the one hand and post-war, postmodernist and contemporary fiction on the other. This customary division has to a certain extent obscured the full complexity of the trajectory of the English novel from its rise to eminence as an emphatically literary genre in the early 20th century to its late-20th-century status of eccentric eminence in new media environments. The Handbook of the English Novel, 1900-2000 addresses this problem by systematically placing the English novel as a specifically modern genre in its twentieth century contexts of critique and commodification as indicated by the genre s uneasy position between artistic ambition and popularity. The political dimension is taken into account with chapters on gender and the burdens of representation from class to ethnicity and from multiculturalism to transculturalism. Extended contextualized close readings of more than 20 key texts supplement the systematic approach and encourage future research by providing overviews of reception and theoretical perspectives."