The Encyclopedia of the Novel - Peter Melville Logan 2014

British Isles (19th Century)

Nicholas Dames

The nineteenth century was undoubtedly the era of the British novel's most famous authors, names that still function as touchstones in the history of fiction: Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, to name only a few. It was an era that saw two broad developments that, while often contradictory in effect, were nonetheless subtly related. First, the rapid expansion of the production of novels, facilitated by technological advances in printing and distribution, and by increasing literacy (see PUBLISHING). Second, the fitful but rapid ascent of the novel's cultural stature from popular entertainment to major art form. When Victorian observers were tempted to take a broad view of the century's developments in fiction they tended to notice both changes. In 1859 David Masson noted that it was no longer possible for a critic to read the entire corpus of contemporary novels, estimating around 7,000 novels published in the previous forty years. Despite, or because of, this deluge of fiction, Masson's book was a proclamation of the aesthetic prestige of the modern novel. By the end of the century it was less possible to mingle admiration for the novel's spread with praise of its aesthetic excellence, but the nineteenth century is nonetheless remarkable for its ability to hold both measurable popularity and aesthetic value in tension. The result was a unique cultural consensus shared enough to be a Victorian truism: that the novel was the best and most representative literary form of the time.

That cultural consensus was mirrored in the equally notable topical and technical similarity of most Victorian novels, which might be called a formal consensus. To a greater degree than the formally inventive fiction of the previous century—and, of course, than the experimental fiction of the twentieth century—nineteenth-century British fiction was stable in its manner, its technical resources, its thematic material, even its range of character types. realism, of an elastic but nonetheless recognizable kind, was the default mode of fiction in the century—recognizable characters (of a broad middle class, usually), familiar spaces (within Britain, particularly southern England), a plain style not devoid of humor but generally unostentatious, and a political stance that was neither revolutionary nor angrily conservative. To later observers this broad formal consensus would seem restrictive enough to be an amusing stereotype; looking back at Victorian fiction in the calamitous year of 1929, Ford Madox Ford mockingly referred to its manner as “the English Nuvvle” (1929, The English Novel, 111). The unfairness of tendentious attacks like these by modernist writers—who were emancipated from many Victorian social strictures but had as a result lost a mass audience—should not blind us to the fact that the short-lived but fertile consensus of Victorian fiction was an effort to fit narrative art within the dynamics of a liberal, increasingly democratic society (see MODERNISM). The Victorian novel was an art that would be both limited and generous, both popular and of independent aesthetic value, both entertaining and instructive—in short, an art that could largely speak of and to a whole society. Elizabeth Ermarth has termed it an art of consensus. The successes and failures of nineteenth-century fiction to imagine and address this whole society are a crucial part of the HISTORY of the novel.

The Material Texts

Despite the shared range of form and thematics, the physical appearance of the nineteenth-century novel was surprisingly varied. The novel was much less a recognizable “thing” than it is today. It existed in a bewildering variety of formats, and was rarely identical with a single “book.” While it has been common for scholars to stress one particular publication format as the essential format for nineteenth-century fiction, too many competing and overlapping formats existed to consider any one the root, or basic, version. At one end of the spectrum, representing the more ephemeral and cheap versions, there was the Victorian serial number: novels published in weekly or, more frequently, monthly installments, each number encased in paper wrappers and spanning forty or so pages of text and illustration (see SERIALIZATION). The practice took hold in Britain with the stunning success of Dickens's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836—37), which started as a series of sketches on sport and then emerged into a novel with a stable cast of comic characters. For roughly the next thirty years British fiction was often issued serially, including such notable novels as William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847—48). The connection between serial fiction and the larger world of periodical publication, from newspapers to journals, was strong and varied in shape. Bradbury and Evans, the publisher of Vanity Fair, was also the firm issuing Punch, the popular humor magazine; the serial numbers of Thackeray's novel claimed on their frontispiece that they were “published at the Punch office.” Elsewhere the connection was more explicit: a range of weekly and monthly periodicals, such as the monthly Cornhill Magazine, or the weeklies Household Words and All the Year Round, regularly included installments of new fiction in their issues and often had noted novelists (Thackeray at the Cornhill, Dickens at the latter two weeklies) as editors or proprietors. The Cornhill, perhaps the major literary organ of the 1860s and 1870s, serialized Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage (1860—61), Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (1864—66), and Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd (1874). As Laurel Brake, among other scholars of book history, has demonstrated, the nineteenth-century novel, particularly the mid-Victorian novel, existed in an intimate relationship with the full range of paraliterary and nonliterary periodicals.

Serial publication was, in economic terms, a response to the artificially high price of books in the nineteenth century. It allowed middle-class readers to satisfy their taste for wide, often indiscriminate reading of fiction. This kind of reading practice has come to be known as “extensive” reading, the casual consumption of numerous texts, as opposed to “intensive” reading, or the careful, devoted consumption of a small set of texts such as scripture. While extensive reading increasingly became a matter of concern among some social commentators, the publishing market devised multiple means to enable its spread.

Aside from serial publication, the other signal Victorian distribution method was the circulating library (see LIBRARIES). Large chains such as Mudie's or W. H. Smith's maintained large collections of fiction in English and allowed subscribers, at the reasonable price of one guinea (one pound and one shilling) a year, to take out a volume at a time. The popularity of the subscription library—the fact that renting rather than buying fiction was a cultural norm for much of the century—allowed British publishers to maintain an artificially high price for their favored format, the three-volume novel or the “three-decker,” which the libraries could afford to pay. As a result, novelists in the second half of the nineteenth century often wrote for the three-volume form: 900 pages of text in three 300-page volumes, or between 150,000 and 200,000 words total.

If the aesthetic result of serial publication was a freedom to experiment with elongated plot structures and recurring cliffhangers, the three-volume format caused the unusual length and amplitude of British fiction. The famous complaint of George Gissing in New Grub Street (1891)—that the three-decker was an exercise in tedium, made possible by the use of large margins, frequent and unnecessary dialogue, and tiresome descriptions of locale—became commonplace as the century progressed. Another result was that circulating libraries could act as de facto censors, refusing to buy novels whose morality was suspect (see CENSORSHIP). Novels by Hardy and George Moore, for instance, were either revised or entirely suppressed because of the reluctance of Mudie's to buy them. Until the 1890s, however, the three-decker seemed eternal. Efforts by publishers to offer novels in one volume were met with skepticism by a public used to consider single volumes as the format for cheap, badly designed reproductions of popular fiction and unused to the idea of purchasing novels in large quantities.

The serial numbers, magazine installments, and volumes that made up the nineteenth-century novel were composite items. Illustration was frequent, and well-known illustrators such as George Cruikshank (1792—1878) or John Everett Millais (1829—1926) were often as much the source of a novel's appeal as the text itself (see ILLUSTRATED). Novels were subdivided texts, articulated into separate volumes, separate numbers, and separate chapters. Page design could be widely different, from the large type and generous white spaces of the three-decker to the cramped, eye-strain-producing type of a serial number (see TYPOGRAPHY). Cost varied as well. The same novel could be available simultaneously in a cheap serial version, an expensive book version, and an even cheaper reproduced version. The overall lesson of the physicality of nineteenth-century fiction is that the novel was, vividly, a collaborative and commercial enterprise, a commodity designed with a great deal of flexibility and ingenuity for as wide a swath as possible of the literate public. It was a quintessential product of liberal society.

The Authors

Although varied in many respects, some useful generalizations can be made about prominent nineteenth-century novelists. The most notable aspect of nineteenth-century British novelists is the large presence, almost a dominance, of women. Native and continental observers alike commented on the phenomenon of the British woman writer. While many notable female authors hid their gender under a pseudonym, such as “Currer Bell” (Charlotte Brontë) or “George Eliot” (Mary Ann Evans), as the century wore on female authorship was seen as a norm, if not the norm. A broad middle-class identity seems to have been another norm, as the paternal occupations of some major novelists suggest: naval bureaucrat (Dickens), estate manager (Eliot), impecunious barrister (Trollope), tailor and outfitter (George Meredith), landscape painter (Wilkie Collins), solicitor and hack writer (Mary Elizabeth Braddon), Unitarian minister (Gaskell), Anglican rector (Austen), Anglican curate (the Brontë sisters). Often this class identity was far less stable than such occupations would suggest. Dickens and Trollope suffered the results of paternal irresponsibility and failure and lived much closer to the lower margin of social respectability than their later circumstances suggested. Thackeray, on the other hand, was educated among a higher social class than his family fortune might have indicated, and for much of his adulthood he was conscious of an invisible barrier separating him from the society he nonetheless partially inhabited. Titles were uncommon additions to authorial names in the period, despite the baronetcies granted to Scott and Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the eventual elevation to the Earl of Beaconsfield of Benjamin Disraeli. University education was by no means the norm among male authors. More frequent was some deep experience of social instability or some firmly rooted ambivalence—a lack of comfort, a consciousness of difference—about the social realms they knew.

Nineteenth-century novelists came to novel-writing by a large variety of psychological and vocational paths, but their literary apprenticeships, particularly among the first wave of Victorian novelists, often looked similar, since some grounding in journalistic or occasional writing was common. The careers of several prominent novelists began with compilations of “sketch” writing, the short, ruminative, humorous pieces on daily life that nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals demanded. Dickens's Sketches by Boz (1836), Thackeray's Book of Snobs (1846—47), and Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life (serialization 1857, pub. 1858) helped launch their authors’ respective careers, while Gaskell's Cranford (1851—53) cemented her reputation. The model for these sketch collections remained the popular set of rural sketches by Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village (1824—32). As Mitford's example suggests, sketches trained writers in discursive prose: description, a casual or offhand manner, and telling observation (see NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE). Given that sketches lacked plot, the element that attracted the reader was the writer's style or tone, the distinctiveness of the authorial voice. The most talented Victorian novelists were able, through the sketch, to develop signature voice styles, which could then be applied to larger canvases. The result was that novelists were not trained to produce plots so much as prose—yet another factor influencing the amplitude and length of the period's novels.

Mitford's example was instructive in its theme as well. Our Village was a sketch collection that, while not wholly fictional, introduced readers to a manner of life that seemed fictional: rural Berkshire existence, drawn with careful detail and an incipient nostalgia. The sense that Our Village looked backward, that it was a history of the present seen from the vantage point of its imminent disappearance, played a role in forming a taste for literary depictions of evanescent, passing social tableaux. It is worth noting that many of the authors whose works define Victorian fiction—Gaskell, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, C. Brontë, Eliot—were not, by birth, “Victorian” at all. They were born before the major technological and social changes of the 1830s and 1840s. The world of their childhood had disappeared decisively by the time they were publishing their major novels, a change signaled in many mid-Victorian narratives by the encroachment of the railroad upon sleepy rural towns. Open nostalgic yearning for the days of coach travel, the days before industrialization, or the days of their childhood animate many of the major novels of these writers (see MEMORY). As a result, one salient peculiarity of Victorian fiction is how often the setting of the novel antedates the novel's publication by thirty or more years. Dickens's David Copperfield (1849—50), Bulwer-Lytton's My Novel (1850—53), and Eliot's Mill on the Floss (1860) were affectionate portrayals of a vanishing world. The success of Hardy's later Wessex novels depended in large part upon his tactile depictions of a rural world caught at the moment immediately prior to its disappearance.

Starting with sketches, progressing to long narratives of personal development set in the recent past, the mid-nineteenth-century novelist could be accused of being only an observer, a miner of personal memories, lacking in imagination, fancy, or philosophical gravitas. The dilemma—how to transcend the merely personal?—was solved by the widespread adoption of HISTORICAL fiction, a genre that almost all major novelists of the period tried at least once. The model was Scott, acknowledged as the century progressed as the progenitor of modern fiction. Masson's British Novelists and their Styles starts with Scott, wiping the historical slate clean of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne. Historical fictions were a transparent attempt to channel the energies of nostalgia in a more challenging, more aesthetically august manner, announcing the author's arrival as a major cultural figure, an inheritor of Scott's mantle, rather than simply a storyteller. Although many were acclaimed at the time as the pinnacle of the novelist's art, few of these mid- and late career novels are widely read today. Thackeray's Henry Esmond (1852), Eliot's Romola (1862—63), Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers (1863), and Hardy's The Trumpet-Major (1880) represent a novelistic ambition that posterity has had difficulty recognizing, although each can be understood as an essential element in the career of the nineteenth-century novelist.

The Realist Consensus

During the initial years of the nineteenth century, DOMESTIC realism was but one genre among a host of competing options. The Austenian novel of restricted country settings, exploring the interactions between a handful of families belonging to the quasi-gentry, was surrounded in the marketplace by the gothic novel. Ann Radcliffe's novels made terror, ghosts, and the haunted houses of aristocrats staples of the fictional imagination well past their publication dates. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) appeared in the same year as the posthumous publication of Austen's Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. As late as 1820, when Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer appeared, the Gothic mode was a live possibility.

During the Napoleonic Wars (1803—15), extremes of political opinion were fought in fictional form, from the Jacobin or radical novels of William Godwin and Elizabeth Inchbald to the conservative, evangelical novels of Hannah More (see RELIGION). The heated proto-anarchism of Godwin's Things as they are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) found a match in More's priggish Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808) or Mary Brunton's Self-Control (1811). Scott's historical novels of eighteenth-century Jacobite rebellions were at the forefront of market and critical success, and they rode a crest of so-called “NATIONAL novels,” which took the reader to the peripheries of the British Isles: Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800), Sydney Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl (1806), and, most prominent among them, Scott's Waverley (1814), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and The Bride of Lammermoor (1819). In the 1820s another crucial subgenre, the “silver-fork novel,” presented detailed, even lavish, descriptions of urban, dandyish aristocratic life. Catherine Gore was the acknowledged master of the genre, but important Victorian novelists began their careers in the genre, Disraeli with Vivian Grey (1826) and Bulwer-Lytton with Pelham (1828).

Put briefly, British fiction from the onset of war with France to the time of Victoria's accession in 1837 was a welter of distinct, outlandish genres, each with their own set of acknowledged classics, each exotic in relation to a middle-class readership, whether in terms of class (silver-fork fiction), geography (the Gothic, national novels), religion (the Catholic trappings of the Gothic, the evangelicalism of More and others), or political viewpoints (Jacobin and anti-Jacobin fiction). From the late 1830s on, this welter was replaced by the relatively stable consensus of domestic realism that would dominate British fiction for the next fifty years. Although British critics and novelists would continue to describe Scott as their most important ancestor, in practice the school of Austen and Mitford had perhaps even more influence. How and why this occurred has remained one of the central questions in the history of British fiction. One answer is that, as a result of the hardening or self-stereotyping of these various genres, they laid themselves open to the kind of parody that was always a part of the toolkit of Victorian writers. Making fun of Gothic or silver-fork fiction, in the interests of a common-sense, disenchanted realism, was a possibility that lingered long past the active life of those genres.

A more specific answer would be to look at the last, and most popular, of these early nineteenth-century fictional subgenres: the “Newgate,” or crime novel, named after the famous prison, and the response to Newgate fiction by emerging writers of the 1830s and 1840s (see DETECTIVE). Bulwer-Lytton's Eugene Aram (1832) and W. H. Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard (1839) were biographies of dashing, successful, dangerous criminals, and runaway successes themselves. Jack Sheppard inspired a stage play, popular songs, and even, so it was claimed by the guilty party, the murder of Lord William Russell, a former Whig MP. The Newgate fad was short-lived, but the attacks and revisions it elicited were more influential. Dickens's Oliver Twist (1837—39) and Thackeray's Catherine (1839—40) were immediate attempts to mock, or undo, the genre. Thackeray's was openly parodic, while Dickens's was a careful unmasking of what he felt to be the essentially immoral appeal of Newgate fiction. In Oliver Twist, an inherently good young boy is threatened but never corrupted by a criminal network from which he is saved by the interventions of decent middle-class figures. The novel places a cordon sanitaire between the decrepit world of London crime—Fagin the Jewish “fence,” Sikes the brutal thief and pimp—and what is presented as the ordinary, sane, familial world of suburban decency. The decency that saves Oliver is not rooted in the law, which decisively fails him, or government, which attempted to starve him. It is essentially private, an affair of individual morals and individual actions. In contrast to the salacious appeal of Newgate fiction, Dickens offers a moral fiction in which a calm, reasonable, private world triumphs over the public mess of law and crime.

The victory of private middle-class morality in Oliver Twist is also a victory of a certain literary mode, even if the very popularity of the novel depended on its most Newgate-like elements, such as Sikes's brutal murder of the prostitute Nancy or the trial of Fagin. That mode was domestic realism. The heroes and anti-heroes of early nineteenth-century fiction—Newgate criminals, the parvenus of silver-fork fiction, the ruthless aristocrats of Gothic fiction—are decisively separated in Victorian fiction from the private normality they threaten. These are often memorable figures: Thackeray's Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair), C. Brontë's Rochester (Jane Eyre, 1847), E. Brontë's Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights, 1847), Collins's Count Fosco (The Woman in White, 1859-60), Trollope's Melmotte (The Way We Live Now, 1875)—even Bram Stoker's eponymous Dracula (1897). They are all unsuited for domestic life. Nationally or racially Other, by temperament or training too large for the settings that contain them, they are the force that the plot of their novel will either eliminate, tame, or reduce to size in the interests of a literary mode that has no place for such figures and no interest in the melodramatic possibilities they present (see MELODRAMA).

Lest this seem like only a loss, it is useful to remember what a tremendous gain this also was, and how the formation of the realist consensus in the late 1830s and early 1840s enabled some of the most penetrating and lasting investigations into psychology and society known to European, or even world, literature. The term “psychological novel” was first used by Eliot, in an 1855 review, to reflect the sheer talkiness of novels at that moment, with their concentration on inner states and intimate relations (“Belles Lettres,” Westminster Review 64:288). The label should not mislead us. The psychology of Victorian fiction is a strongly social one, oriented toward how selves negotiate the demands, and even the simple presence, of others. It is strongly epistemological: its questions are, how do we know the world, and how much of it is truly knowable? How much do we need to know of others in order to act wisely? And how much do we need to know of ourselves in order to know others? This is a psychology of liberal society: a psychology of the self in the context of others who must be managed, negotiated with, partnered with, thwarted, but most of all tolerated. The sheer bulk and complexity of such masterworks as Dickens's Bleak House (1852—53) was necessitated by the socially panoramic scale—from the aristocratic Dedlocks to the crossing-sweeper Jo—of such a liberal vision, as well as the effort to connect such disparate social realms.

The first premise of such an epistemological psychology is seeing. What do we not see, and what should we see? The importance of vision gave realist fiction both a formal technique and an ethics. Description of things normally hidden from view becomes a moral duty. In its political form, description, as in Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848), serves to introduce the presumably middle-class reader to the horrors of industrial wage-labor and thereby to humanize individuals whose class difference renders them politically mute. James Buzard has termed this impulse “autoethnographic,” or the Victorian novel's impulse to map the unknown spaces of its native land. Gaskell takes her reader through the cellars of Manchester to witness the living conditions of industrialism's poorest subjects to invite the necessary outcome of an epistemology of seeing: sympathy. Sympathy was the primary ethic of Victorian realism, and the means used to elicit it were far from the plotted melodramas of the Gothic or anti-Jacobin modes. Instead, careful description, particularly of milieux or environments, would perform the task of what Gaskell, in the preface to Mary Barton, called giving “utterance to the agony which, from time to time, convulses this dumb people.” Rather than heroes or anti-heroes, Victorian realism sought a reader's identification with its central characters and a sympathy which would bypass the barriers of class or self-interest.

Sympathy, or identification, demanded careful management, and the strictures of domestic realism existed in large part to make such identification possible. The fantastic or supernatural was barred; if present, it was exposed as a ruse. The time frame of Victorian novels was tailored to the temporality of human projects, something on the order of several months to two or three years was the normative time span of domestic realism, time in which human plans could be formed, complicated, and brought to fruition, but not time enough for the difficulties of biological aging or decay. The prevalence of this time span was partly created by the importance of courtship in the period's fiction, which functioned as an ideal form of human plan. Unlike the far-flung locales of the century's earlier genres, domestic realism was xenophobic in comparison. As Franco Moretti has demonstrated, Victorian novels, taking the lead from Austen, retreat to a Midlands or southern English setting, except when problematic characters need to be sent abroad in order to be erased from the plot (see REGIONAL). Plot recedes in importance, dispersed into multiple plots, as in serial fictions, or dissipated by a concentration on motive rather than action. The central examples of domestic realism—Thackeray's Pendennis (1848—50) and The Newcomes (1853—55), Trollope's six-novel Barsetshire series (1855—67), Margaret Oliphant's six-novel Carlingford series (1863—76)—were long, discursive texts that concentrated on the nuances of social psychology in familiar English settings.

The artistic pinnacle of domestic realism, Eliot's Middlemarch (1871—72), was also in some sense its undoing. Eliot's probing of the conditions of sympathy enabled her to depict its limits and its failures, be they psychological self-deceptions or political inefficacy. Eliot's characters are generally well-meaning, in a very basic sense, but their self-ignorance leads them into inextricable social complexities. Eliot complicates the process of knowing that other domestic novels took for granted. In the sinuous and elaborate qualifications offered by her narrator, knowing becomes a difficult balancing act between gauging possibilities based on insufficient information and dealing with an excess of information that clouds judgment. What domestic realism tended to narrate as a simple matter, such as a young girl's desire to marry, becomes in Eliot a compound of complex ambivalences mixing social, psychological, and even physiological determinants. The result is a distended narrative, since all actions need careful, nuanced explanation, and even the destinies of two individuals in a small Midlands town, the scientist Tertius Lydgate and the passionate but thwarted Dorothea Brooke, require situating in a vast network of individuals. Realism along these lines seemed scarcely possible. At the very least it is dauntingly intricate and demanding of both author and reader. As Henry James put it in his review of Middlemarch: “If we write novels so, how shall we write History?” (1956, The Future of the Novel, ed. L. Edel, 89).

The Consensus Unraveled

The first signs of the undoing of the realist consensus appeared as early as 1859, with All the Year Round's first installment of Collins's The Woman in White. Virtually overnight a new subgenre, the “sensation novel,” seized the public imagination and the publishing industry. Equally successful versions soon followed, such as Ellen Wood's East Lynne (1861) and Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862). The sensation novel was in many ways tethered to realism; its settings were no less domestic and, rather than any supernatural element, they turned more often to contemporary sciences, particularly physiology and psychological theories of various kinds. Sensation fiction reminded critics of the enduring power of subgenres and revealed an even wider reading public than had been suspected, a public for whom the elongated plots and epistemological complications of domestic realism was too slow. Collins, for one, had recognized this demographic shift as early as 1858 in a Household Words article called “The Unknown Publicentury.”

The sensation novel fad waned by the early 1870s, but its lesson endured. Domestic, psychological realism was not the only or even, perhaps, the optimal fictional mode, and a growing reading public, expanded by the development of national education, would result in a market fractured yet again into subgenres and distinct types. In the years to come this lesson would be borne out by the difficult, epigrammatic social comedies of Meredith; popular detective fiction, as represented by Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories; novels set in exotic imperial locales by writers as different in orientation as Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, and Ouida; adventure stories as crafted by Robert Louis Stevenson. These and other options made domestic realism only one possibility among many. For those who, like Gissing, insisted on practicing a traditional realism still, the mode metamorphosed from a questing epistemology to a stern, despairing, indicative tone that described “the way things are” at its most forbidding and inalterable. A further blow was dealt by the sudden collapse of the three-volume novel in 1894, as a result of the collaborative decision of circulating libraries to refuse to pay the inflated price publishers had traditionally asked for new three-deckers. As the century ended, British fiction was as fractured and fractious as it had been at its start. Domestic realism, the century's greatest and most characteristic mode, began to reinvent itself. That reinvention, however, came at the cost of its loss of widespread cultural currency. The psychological novel mutated into the modernist art novel.

SEE ALSO: Decadent Novel, Gender Theory, Naturalism, Photography, Reprints.

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