The English Novel Author:Walter Allen In this panorama of English fiction the development of the novel is followed from Pilgrim's Progress to James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence. The evolution of the novel during this period of 250 years is revealed by an appraisal of the work of the most significant of our novelists, and in this piece of sustained analysis Mr Walter Allen shows himself ... more »to be an acute and sensitive critic as well as an authoritative historian.
This distinguished book is one of the finest and liveliest critical histories of the novel ever published. The author, himself a novelist, unfolds the panorama of English fiction from Bunyan down through all the great writers to the two giants of the 20th century -- D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce.
To follow the development of that 17th century innovation, the novel, through the works of such masters as Richardson, Fielding, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, George Eliot, Conrad and Henry James to the present is an exhilarating experience in the hands of Mr. Allen, who so expands the reader's understanding of the works discussed as to impel a reading or a re-reading of them.« less