Middeke Martin, Pietrzak-Franger Monika (ed.) Handbook of the English Novel, 1830-1900

Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2020. — 686 p. — (Handbooks of English and American Studies. Volume 9). — ISBN 978-3110376418.Historical as well as aesthetic developments, contexts, and events ask for multiperspec-tival interpretations. Historical evolution and its conditions as well as its phenomena are results of processes that such fixed demarcations as neat year dates, as precise and well-reasoned as they may be, can never entirely capture. Analysing the historical and aesthetic contextual factors of an epoch, therefore, always implies both narration and choice. We have chosen not to pursue Eric Hobsbawm’sideaofthe‘long nine-teenth century’, which covers the time from the French Revolution to the beginning ofthe First WorldWarandcentres roundsuch major epistemic coordinates as‘revolu-tion’,‘capital’,and‘empire’, but, instead, dedicate this handbook to the history, poeto-logy, and theory of the English novel and its major representatives in between 1830 and 1900. Along with the Edwardian age, we therefore systematically exclude the age and literature of British Romanticism, which separate volumes in the present series of handbooks are addressed to (see Reinfandt 2017 and Haekel 2017). We shall thus focus on the period which nearly coincides withthe reign of QueenVictoria (1837–1901).
The ‘Victorian’ period has often been termed the era of ‘unprecedented progresses’ and the ‘age of contradictions’. Both perspectives seem to simplify the transformations characteristic of the time whilst also offering contradictory value judgements: the for-mer continues the era’s own self-glorification, the latter spotlights the incongruences that became visible at the time. Instead, it may be worth considering the period as an age of metamorphosis. These seventy years continued, tightened, aggravated, and made self-reflexive the Romantic idea of themodernhuman being who, for the first time in their history, found themselves, their surroundings, their living conditions, and their place in history not only changing, butalsochangeable.Everyaspect of human life was to be transformed: daily routines, social structuring, international standing but also, if not especially, people’s self-perception vis-à-vis the (natural) world. While industrialisation, along withglobalisation and urbanisation, brought changes to the perception of space and time, it also literally transformed the face of the earth and, retrospectively, marked the onset of the ‘Anthropocene’,oreventhe ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore 2016). The advent of modernity, especially, the shifting conditions of industrial capitalism, had agreat impact on individuals so that the actual bodies and psyches–and the traces they have left–became tangible indi-cators of Victorian metamorphoses.
Part I of this handbook offers systematic essays, which deal with major historical, cultural and aesthetic contexts of the English novel (1830-1900). Part II leads through the work of more than 25 eminent Victorian novelists. Each chapter provides historical/biographical contextualisation, overview, close reading and analysis and encourages further research by looking upon the authors work from the perspectives of cultural and literary theory.