Nation and Novel

 Preface and Acknowledgements

Nation and Novel is a literary history of the English novel and its dis-
tinctive, often subversive contribution to ideas of nationhood. In it I have
concentrated for the most part on the major novelists, those whose
writings have been most influential and have attracted a lasting and
international readership. I have engaged in more detailed textual inter-
pretation than is usual in literary history, pursuing the approach to the
nature of the novel form and its relationship to English national identity
that I outline in Chapter 1. My primary intellectual debt in writing this
book has been to the small army of literary critics and cultural historians
who have transformed the study of English fiction of the seventeenth,
eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in recent decades. This
book could not have been written without their labours of historical
research, textual editing, cultural theorizing, and reinterpretation. Few of
the scholars on whom I have drawn are explicitly named in the chapters
that follow—the alternative would have been to have put their names,
which can be distracting for the non-specialist reader, on every page—but
my appreciation of their work is no less heartfelt for that. All citations in
the text are identified in the notes, and it is there and in the Further
Reading that my indebtedness can be traced.