Further reading. What edition of a novel should I buy? What critical books should I read?

Transcription

1 Further reading What edition of a novel should I buy? This problem is unlikely to bother you at school, as you will probably be supplied with a copy of the novel; and at college or university the lecturers will often specify particular editions. But there will be times when you want to buy a classic novel and find that it is available in as many as half-a-dozen paperback editions. In most respects there is little to choose between them. All are likely to provide a reliable text, so there is a very good argument for purchasing the cheapest. If, however, you want to do some sustained work on the text, it might be worth choosing an edition with a substantial Introduction and equally substantial Notes: if there is a detail in the novel that you do not understand, it is always helpful to be able to tum to the back of the book and find an immediate explanation, and the critical Introduction is likely to stimulate, and help give a shape to, your own thinking. It may, therefore, sometimes be worth paying more for the edition which strikes you as having the most comprehensive Notes and the fullest Introduction. The editions referred to in this book are, where there is a choice, the Penguin Classics versions, simply because they are probably the most commonly available and the most widely used. What critical books should I read? The most directly useful books are those which offer close discussion of the particular novel you are interested in; sometimes this is combined with an edition of the text. There are, to my mind, two outstanding series of this kind. One series is Routledge English Texts (General Editor: John Drakakis), which provide an Introduction, and then, in addition, after the text of the novel, offer a Critical Com- 202

2 FURTHER READING 203 mentary. Three volumes in the series which strike me as including a particularly interesting Critical Commentary essay are Wuthering Heights, edited by Heather Glen, The Mill on the Floss, edited by Sally Shuttleworth, and Heart qf Darkness, edited by John Batchelor. The other series combining text and critical discussion which I would recommend is Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (General Editor: Ross C. Murfin; published in America by St Martin's Press and distributed outside North America by Macmillan). The volumes in this series offer an Introduction, the complete text, and then a substantial selection of recent critical essays which are chosen to represent the range and variety of current critical approaches. There are, to date, only a limited number of books in this series, but the editions of Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, Heart qf Darkness and A Portrait qf the Artist as a Young Man are likely to prove immensely useful and illuminating to any student of literature. Another very useful kind of critical book is that which provides a selection of essays about a single text or author. Two series of this kind are Modern Critical Interpretations, focusing on individual texts, and Modern Critical Vzews, dealing with a number of works by one author (General Editor of both series: Harold Bloom; published in the USA by Chelsea House). Each of the volumes in these series contains about ten essays, illustrating a broad range of critical approaches. They are very good, but offer little in the way of explanation of, or guidance through, the critical essays. For this kind of annotated and directed reading of criticism, one has to tum to the New Casebook series, published by Macmillan, and edited, as a series, by the editors of the How to Study Literature series, myself and Martin Coyle. The volumes in this series provide about ten essays, usually on a single text, together with an Introduction that explains the kind of critical thinking that is going on in the essays. All the essays illustrate current critical approaches; as such, the books in the series provide a very direct way of coming to grips with the priorities and methods of current theoretically-inspired criticism. The books complement, rather than replace, the original Casebook volumes (General Editor: A.E. Dyson; published by Macmillan), which offer a broad selection of critical views from the date of a text's first appearance up to the early 1970s. The New Casebook volumes, by contrast, focus on recent criticism. A rather similar series, but focusing on authors or topics rather than individual texts, is Longman Critical Readers (General Editors: Raman Selden and Stan Smith). The volumes on George Eliot, edited by K. M. Newton, on

3 204 HOW TO STUDY A NOVEL D. H. Lawrence, edited by Peter Widdowson, and Charles Dickens, edited by Steven Connor, are particularly recommended. When you are confronted by a number of books about one author on a library shelf, the best book to start with is the most up-to-date one; there is every likelihood that the author will discuss earlier criticism, and provide some sense of the range of current ways of looking at the novelist under consideration. Read just enough criticism at school to discover what literary criticism is and to stimulate your own ideas. At college or university, start to read more, but as a complement to your own thinking rather than as a substitute for thinking. Don't plagiarise critical books, either directly or by too great a reliance on other people's ideas and examples. It is, however, perfectly legitimate to use a critic's ideas if you apply them to an example in the text that you have chosen yourself. When you do that, you will be saying something new. What general books about the novel should I read? Some of the most interesting critical books are those in which a critic looks at a number of novels by several writers. This format allows the critic to develop an original, and sometimes provocative, view of fiction. The most successful books of this kind amount to the focusing of a new approach in critical thinking. Perhaps the first book about novels to make a real impact in this kind of way was F. R. Leavis's 1he Great Tradition (1948): in a very assertive manner, Leavis declared that the great English novelists are Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad and Lawrence. What Leavis appreciated in fiction was a certain moral seriousness, which he found in these writers. Leavis's views shaped the taste of several generations of students, and the influence of his views informs a great many critical books published in the 1950s and 1960s. It might even be said that the influence of Leavis only really began to wane with the first stirrings of structuralist criticism in the Sixties. To see how British thinking about the novel developed from around this time, an excellent critic to look at is David Lodge. In a series of books - the ones I would recommend are Language if Fiction (1966), 1he Modes if Modern Writing (1977), and After Bahktin (1990) - Lodge comes to terms with the new theoretical thinking that was emerging, primarily from France, from the Sixties onwards, and shows how it can be applied to, and provide us with new ways of thinking and

4 FURTHER READING 205 talking about, fiction. One of the great merits of Lodge is the clarity with which he writes; each of his books offers a very accessible sense of a critical method that the student is likely to feel that he or she can emulate in some kind of way. Another critic who is likely to inspire the student, although he might simply dazzle with the inventive brilliance of his readings of fiction, is J. Hillis Miller. Miller was one of the first American academics to take up deconstructive criticism; at times, deconstructive analyses can become rather dry and difficult, but in Miller we always see deconstruction in action as he grapples in a very direct way with most of the major novels from Britain and America. Any book by Miller is going to provide an excellent demonstration of just how good and interesting novel criticism can be, but I would particularly recommend Fiction and Repetition (1982). There are now a great many feminist readings of fiction (indeed, several major publishers have produced series of feminist re-readings of fiction), but the book that anyone with a genuine interest in feminist criticism should perhaps start with is Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's 7he Madwoman in the Attic: 7he Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (1979). Gilbert and Gubar's book has been much criticised, but it would be hard to conceive of a book presenting a more absorbing and all-embracing introduction to a particular area of study. A list like this, of interesting and helpful critical books could, of course, run on and on. I could, for example, direct the reader to valuable books on psychoanalytic criticism, etc., but rather than provide a comprehensive guide, it might be better if I conclude here by drawing attention to the two recent critics whose work I have found most interesting, and whose books, I know from my experiences as a teacher of literature, have interested, and indeed inspired, a great many of my students. One of these critics is D. A. Miller who, in Narrative and its Discontents: Problems qf Closure in the Traditional Novel (1981) and 7he Novel and the Police ( 198 7), starts with issues of narratology (a concern with how narratives work), but then, however, opens up questions of ideology, politics and the social role of the novel. The other critic whose work I have found really stimulating is Mary Poovey, particularly her two books 7he Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works qf Mary Wollstonecrqft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen ( 1984) and Uneven Developments: 7he Ideological Work qf Gender in Mid- Vutorian England (1989). Both these works combine feminism with a New Historicist interest in seeing how the text functions in a

5 206 HOW TO STUDY A NOVEL particular society, with an emphasis, as there is in so much current criticism, on how such matters are constituted and debated primarily in the language of the literary text.