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This chapter explores how the representation of the sexual content of “public” courtship is achieved in Jane Austen's novels. It argues that bloom underpins the marriage plot and, unlike the picturesque landscape or the garden, is not an overt subject within the narrative, except for the occasional reference to blooming complexions. Rather, bloom is a narrative indicator of sequence and action leading to the novel's closure in marriage. Detailed readings of four Austen bloom plots (Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion) are used to show how these texts represent the sexual dimension to courtship. In doing so, the argument about bloom suggests an alternative account of readerly pleasure in closure, one that emphasizes the sexual potential with which the novel closes: marriage as the initiation into an already forecast erotics.

Novels written in the 18th and 19th centuries are filled with depictions of girls “blooming” or “in bloom” — from Frances Burney's Evelina, whose blooming complexion attracts libertines and suitors alike, to John Cleland's Fanny Hill, whose bloom is explicitly tied to sexual initiation. The prevalence of this figurative language of “bloom” and the ease with which botanical facts are matched with female physiology raises the question: whence does it arise, and what gives it its sustaining power as a method for depicting nascent female sexuality in the marriage plots of the 19th-century novel? This chapter answers this question by looking at the newly sexualized botany of Linnaeus and his mid-18th-century exegetes, where aesthetic practice and scientific classification meet, and where the novel subsequently finds a significant register for discussing and disposing of female destinies.

This chapter shows how Henry James inserts himself into the English novelistic tradition, forming the final stage of the 19th-century bloom lineage. James's novels about the marriageable girl are decadent texts that feed on the prior literary convention; the bloom plot becomes in these novels its formal subject, rather than that which the novels dramatize. James is used to show the force of what G. S. Rousseau has called the “linguistic ripples” of Linnaean taxonomy, even though those ripples were, by James's moment, more clearly emanating from their novelistic precedent than from their original taxonomic center.

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the focus on this book: the girl “in bloom,” or the female whose social and sexual maturation is expressed by the use of a word (bloom) whose genealogy can be traced back to the function of the bloom or flower in Linnaeus's botanical system. The chapter then discusses the use of bloom in 18th- and 19th-century fiction, and the one-to-one correspondences between botanical theory and novelistic practice. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter discusses the literary establishment of the 1980s, observing the transition between generations of writers and closely examining some changes that occurred in the book business. It studies the trend of the English novel, and tries to distinguish between ‘post-war’ and ‘contemporary’ writers.

This chapter examines the ubiquitous plot device of the marriage proposal. It argues that the marriage plot provides resolution in the novel of manners for the same reason that comedy has used the wedding celebration as an ending since Aristophanes. Success in the comic mode requires a coming together of opposites, and marriage solves that problem on a characterological level better than other alternatives. Even so, the pattern in the nineteenth-century English novel is not without its mysteries, and unraveling those mysteries tells us something about understanding, expectations, problems, and anxieties in Regency and Victorian England. Two questions help to situate these mysteries, for even though marriages take place with numbing predictability in the nineteenth-century novel, a reader hardly ever finds a full-blown, articulated, successful marriage proposal in them. Why, then, to formalize these questions, are most successful proposals of marriage performed off stage or through indirect discourse or narrative summary, and why are so many of the unfortunate swains in these novels clergymen or lawyers who handle the situation directly but badly? These patterns continue across the nineteenth century and beyond, but the chapter focuses on two leading novelists, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, with special attention given to two of their most prominent and frequently cited novels, Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Dickens's Bleak House (1853).

This chapter studies scandalous fiction. One way of registering how scandal fiction might figure in a revised history of the novel is to consider scandal fiction as embodying everything that the polite novel sought to repudiate or disavow: criminality, sexuality, sensation, vulgarity, voyeurism, and reflexivity. For just as the novel genre itself is a scandal for much of the eighteenth century, the increasing respectability of the novel genre from the 1750s is predicated upon the move away from forms such as romans á clef and chroniques scandaleuses. Indeed, the English novel starts to define itself as a national genre against the scandalous excesses of the French or Italian novel—which it often does while exploiting and purveying these foreign excesses. This is particularly the case with the most scandalous forms of fiction: pornography and erotic fiction.

This chapter examines foreign novels, which greatly overshadowed the English novel. The prevalence of imitations and translations of foreign novels had been a matter of significant critical concern throughout the first half of the eighteenth century and contemptuously identified by many a censorious reviewer as a corrupting influence on both the morals and letters of the nation. By the middle of the century, however, there was a strong sense that the English novel had come of age; and as British novelists progressively consolidated their position both at home and abroad, readers became decreasingly dependent on foreign fiction. Nonetheless, non-native fiction remained a convenient focus for multiple anxieties relating to the genre of the novel and its commercialization. For while the overall picture for 1750–1820 as regards imported imaginative literature was one of general decline, many foreign novelists continued to compete successfully for the attention of the British public.

This chapter focuses on English-language novels in Africa. The novel as a genre came to Africa from Europe along with European languages, alphabetic writing, and the printing press. The first English-language novels were written by white settlers, and, before 1950, the African novel in English is nearly synonymous with the South African novel. Black Africans first came in contact with the novel at mission schools where English fiction was part of the curriculum. In spite of these origins, however, African fiction should not be considered a mere offshoot of European literature, for the task of writing fiction in Africa required a reinvention of the genre. Adapting the conventions inherited from Europe to describe colonial societies and to narrate African dilemmas was a task not unlike that faced by the originators of the novel in England and France in the eighteenth century.

This chapter explores English-language novels in the Caribbean. The West Indian novel was seen as a post-Second World War literary phenomenon, the creation of male authors who, born in Britain's Caribbean colonies, began arriving in England in the 1950s as part of a larger wave of Caribbean immigrants. Despite the diverse origins and perspectives of the Anglophone Caribbean's many writers, several dominant themes emerge. West Indian novels comprised a spectrum of direct, indirect, partial, and unwitting deviations from and challenges to English literary genres and ideologies. Novelists were particularly engaged with the ideologies of race and domesticity and the closely linked genre of romance. Nearly all West Indian novels of the nineteenth century were romances featuring elite West Indian heroes who excelled their English counterparts in domestic and civic virtue, while the twentieth century saw the emergence of literature that so revelled in social and sexual disorder that it constituted anti-romance.

This chapter discusses English-language novels in Canada, focusing on a limited set of texts that exemplify key historical and socio-economic concerns informing the periods of early settler-colonialism, Confederation, and early to late modernism in Canada. The development of the novel in Canada to 1950 is at times a bleak story, albeit one with notable highlights. In telling that story, the chapter eschews a linear trajectory of ‘development’ in favour of a two-pronged approach: adopting an issue-based focus, the chapter employs the categories of empire, race, and gender; the second approach focuses on the historical conditions of the production and circulation of novels. It then looks at the post-1950 era to account for the ways in which the canon of pre-1950s Canadian novels is shaped and/or sustained by contemporary institutional forces such as the New Canadian Library and Editing Modernism in Canada Project.

This chapter focuses on the prehistory of the novel, with emphasis on the multiple forms of oral and written nonfiction narrative that constitute the history of the American novel. These forms include history, travel writing, execution sermon, confession, criminal narrative, captivity narrative, and slave narrative. The chapter begins with an overview of the role of Native storytellers in communicating the history and values of the ancient people through myth, story, song, dance, and performance. It then turns to The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624), a text that includes the original story of Pocahontas and John Smith. It also examines the emergence of the English novel as a major form; the myth, allegory, and providential plot in works such as Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682); and classics of American national and literary self-definition. Finally, the chapter analyzes an example of transatlantic narrative that encompasses three continents (Africa, Europe, and the Americas): The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789).

This chapter asks if there is something about the displacement of national identity that correlates with the formal development of the ‘English Novel’, even though that designation is now considered untenable, if not unusable. Reservations about tracing correlations, let alone compatibilities, between the persistence of Englishness and the prose of novelists whose job might be to decentre it, are so consolidated in literary studies that the cautions hardly need rehearsing. Yet the chapter considers how we might approach writers whose self-categorization defies criticism’s prevailing inhibitions. And even when we do spot such contradictions, the chapter considers whether we can arbitrate, textually or biographically, in discrepancies between ethnic and aesthetic realms. In doing so, this chapter explores the ‘fairy tale’ of Englishness and what it might mean for our historical understanding of contemporary fiction.