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This chapter focuses on the global British novel. While the novel as such has its roots in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century romance, the British novel owes its emergence and subsequent rise to global supremacy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the expansion and ascendancy of the British Empire. The history of the globalization of the British novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is therefore by necessity a history of negotiations and compromises between the foreign British form at the core of the literary system and the various local realities in the peripheral zones. Consequently, the chapter's discussion of the British novel's transmission to America, the West Indies, India, and Europe will focus on variations in the dynamic interaction between the core's formal influence and local resistance; between hegemonic ideology and local mentalités; and between global markets and local material practices.

Na hun vermissing haalden de foto’s van de blonde jongetjes verschillende keren het journaal. Het was het voorjaar van 2013 en ze waren voor het laatst gezien met hun vader. Zijn eigen lichaam was eerder in een bos in Limburg aangetroffen. Na verschillende publieke zoekacties werden de kinderen van 7 en 9 jaar dood gevonden bij een afwateringsbuis in de provincie Utrecht. Wat kunnen we leren van de zaak Julian en Ruben? In het artikel is een onjuistheid vermeld. Het lichaam van de vader is aangetroffen in de bossen nabij Doorn i.p.v. het in het artikel genoemde bos in Limburg.

This chapter has seven sections: 1. General; 2. Poetry (excluding Blake and women poets); 3. Women Poets; 4. William Blake; 5. Prose Fiction; 6. Non-Fictional Prose; 7. Drama. Section 1 is by Orianne Smith; section 2 is by Matthew Scott; section 3 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 4 is by Jason Whittaker; section 5 is by Felicity James; section 6 is by Gavin Budge; section 7 is by Amy Muse.

“Viewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another. We cannot easily distinguish between them on formal grounds unless we approach them with specific preconceptions about the kinds of truths that each is supposed to deal in. But the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of a history. Both wish to provide a verbal image of ‘reality.’”1 Hayden White’s provocative statement, made almost 25 years ago in his essay “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” is today almost as controversial as then: depending on the respective sides they stand on in the truth-fancy, history-fiction divide, most literary critics (be it in many cases under the modern appellation of “cultural critics”) will applaud White’s observation as both scientifically accurate and liberating, while remarkably many historians are still likely to regard White’s comments as dangerously relativistic if not downright reductionist. And yet, White reminds us in the same essay, what is now often perceived as the opposition of history to fiction is an invention of fairly recent date. Prior to the French Revolution, says White, “historiography was conventionally regarded as a literary art. More specifically, it was regarded as a branch of rhetoric and its ‘fictive’ nature generally recognized.”2

This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 1, pp. 454–461, © 2001, Elsevier Ltd.

When the academic discipline of ‘American Studies’ was developed in the course of the 1930s, it was explicitly set up as an area of studies where scholars and students of, notably, history and literature could meet and join forces in an integrated, interdisciplinary context in order to redress what was felt to be an increasingly acute challenge: how to bridge the widening gap between the literary and historical approaches to the study of American society. However, the emergence of this new, holistic approach to American society immediately created its own dialectic: between those seeing American society as a whole, and those emphasizing its plurality. Until the 1960s and 1970s, roughly, there was a fair degree of consensus among scholars about what the common denominators were in American society. Ever since the ‘culture wars’ of the 1980s and early 1990s, however, American studies has come to reflect methodologically the ‘cultural crisis’ and fragmentation that many have observed in American society itself. Although it may never have become the holistic approach originally envisaged, then, few in American studies would deny that trying to understand and describe American society is in effect an attempt to fathom what sustains that society, what forces operate it and direct its purposes. That is what American studies, from a wide variety of disciplinary angles, continues to do.

The years between 1775 and 1815 constitute a crucial episode in the evolutionary history of Europe and America. Between the start of the American Revolution, with the first armed clashes between British regulars and American militiamen at Concord and Lexington, and the closing act of the French Revolution, with the eclipse of Napoleon's dreams of pan-European glory on the battlefield of Waterloo, America and Europe witnessed the rise and fall of radicalism, which left virtually no aspect of public and private life untouched. While the American colonies managed to wrench themselves away from their colonial parent, and while France careered down the stormy rapids of its own Revolution, Great Britain went through the turbulent process of redefining itself vis-a-vis both these emerging nations, and the world at large. But the period 1775 to 1815 offers more than the two ideological Revolutions that determined the face of modern America and Europe: feeding into and emanating from these Revolutions there were major watersheds in virtually all areas of cultural, intellectual and political life - varying from the rise of Romanticism to the birth of abolitionism, and from the beginnings of modern feminism to the creation of modern nationhood and its enduring cultural stereotypes. In this collection of interdisciplinary essays, historians and literary critics from both sides of the Atlantic analyze a broad spectrum of the watersheds and faultlines that arose in this formative era of Euro-American relations. Individually, the essays trace one or more of the transatlantic patterns of intellectual, cultural or scientific cross-pollination between the Old and the New World, between pre- and post-Revolutionary modes and mores. Collectively, the essays argue that the many revolutions that produced the national ideologies, identities and ideas of state of present-day America and Europe did not merely play a role in national debates, but that they very much belonged to an intricate network of transnational and, more particularly, transatlantic dialogues.

Most of the essays in James Fenimore Cooper: New Historical and Literary Contexts are either directly or indirectly informed by the need to confront Cooper's tales with the indeterminate historical context from which they arose. Others start from the premise that our understanding of Cooper's work can benefit significantly from displacing it from its traditional position in American literary history and by repositioning it in a new literary context. What unites all the essays is a commitment to read Cooper's works as culturally-encoded documents that both reflect and give us access to the complex, equivocal mind that created them. This is not to say that the essays share a common critical or methodological approach; indeed, they were commissioned and selected with the specific intention of applying contending approaches in contemporary literary discourse to the canonical Cooper. While the array of critical approaches represented in the book is by no means exhaustive, interpretive strategies vary from textual, formalistic New Critical readings to old historical, contextual readings, and from new historical, revisionist readings to deconstructive readings. Through their critical diversity these essays will cast a new light on Cooper's work in relation to its historical context, and on the relevance of Cooper's work to both nineteenth-century and modern literary, historical, and ideological debates.

Maria Edgeworth's prefatory comments respond to the debate about the social function of the novel that had haunted it throughout the eighteenth century, and was especially intense in the last decade. She acknowledges that in spite of the worthy examples of Burney and Inchbald there was a pervasive sense that the novel was a debased form, mad, bad, and dangerous, particularly for impressionable female readers. In the spring of 1801, she wrote to her sister Harriet that Belinda would be available in the autumn: "Pray give her ladyship a better character than she deserves, and do not despise Belinda even if you should meet her in a circulating library" (qtd. in Kirkpatrick, xi). We begin with Edgeworth's comments because they raise a number of issues that will be central to our claims for the Romantic-era novel, preeminently classification-the LinnaeanDarwinian desire to categorize the species that subtends writings of the period and the relation between the novel and the public sphere, including the material technologies of circulation. We will argue that the generic promiscuity of the Romantic-era novel, which was so problematic for conservative contemporary critics as well as for many post-Romantic literary historians, in fact opens up new possibilities for exploring and mapping the contours and conditions of the cultural-historical landscape of the second half of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Britain.