Bookplanet: Terry Eagleton reviews a book about the birth and growth of the English novel

What are we?
By Terry Eagleton
Review of Nation and Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day by Patrick Parrinder

As a literary form, the novel is more fascinated by rogues, orphans, vagrants, whores and eccentrics than it is by knights, demi-gods or aristocrats. It is the most realist of genres, one for which the odds and ends of everyday life are a lot more exciting than the heroic or supernatural. An 18th-century reader, raised on a high-minded diet of elegy and pastoral, must have felt stunned on first encountering the jagged prose of a Daniel Defoe, with its street-wise populism and delight in the commonplace. The novel has an inexhaustible middle-class appetite for the real.

As its name suggests, deriving as it does from "new", the novel is the product of the modern, secularised world. Sceptical of absolutes and wary of conventions, it is the kind of writing in which you can do more or less what you like. You can explore emotional intimacies, record the decline of a whole civilisation or - if you happen to be Marcel Proust - combine the two. Unlike ancient tragedy or the court masque, the novel is an "unofficial" form, with no formal links to state or sovereign. In fact, it is less a genre in its own right than one that continually cannibalises other genres. As a promiscuous mix of drama, poetry, tragedy, epic, narrative and romance, it is the most hybrid of all canonical forms. Patrick Parrinder argues in this absorbing book that realist novels constantly recycle old-style romances: the highwaymen of the early English novel are a race memory of Robin Hood, while the Dick Whittington theme crops up as late as Dickens's Dombey and Son and Great Expectations

The rise of the novel goes hand-in-hand with the emergence of the modern nation-state. When it first appears in 18th-century Britain, the novel is among other things an exercise in nation-building. It helps to mould a shared national sensibility, as well as holding an admiring or satirical mirror to it. Novels, Parrinder points out, are consumed in private, unlike classical theatre or oral narrative; but they also depend on the presence of a sizeable community of men and women who speak the same language and share roughly the same cultural assumptions. Such communities are generally known as nations, and fictions play a key role in their collective image of themselves. Because novels are capacious pieces of writing, they have the space to roam from one end of the social scale to the other, shifting from Fagin's underworld to Brownlow's suburbia. No other kind of literary art can match their blend of social range and psychological subtlety.

In the 18th century, as Nation and Novel shows, the rise of the novel is bound up with the forging of a new kind of Protestant national identity, as Britain consolidates its commercial and imperial power after the revolutionary upheavals of the civil war era and the Restoration. It's no accident that Defoe writes a scabrous poem entitled "The True-Born Englishman", as well as producing what Parrinder sees as a study in national character in the figure of the robustly individualist Robinson Crusoe. Henry Fielding wrote the original lyrics for "The Roast Beef of Old England", while Samuel Richardson's novels can be read among other things as Whiggish political allegories.

It took an outsider, Sir Walter Scott, to launch some of the most searching reflections on nationhood and national character. The art of Dickens, an author Parrinder reads as both an instinctive republican and a Little Englander, was praised by George Gissing as embodying the spirit of the English race. Trollope's The Way We Live Now, which portrays an English nation at the mercy of (probably Jewish) foreign crooks and speculators, is one instance of that spirit at its most sourly xenophobic.

As the Victorian age passed into a world of mass migrations, new nation-states and the collapse of empires, national identity became an increasingly self-conscious literary topic. As Parrinder points out, the very idea of national identity, as opposed to national character, reflects a certain anxiety. National character, supposedly, is an objective set of features (in the case of the English, common sense, moderation, idiosyncrasy, philistinism, emotional reserve and so on), while identity is usually what you are still in search of. "What are we?" is a less unsettling question for a nation to ask itself than "Who are we?"

For Virginia Woolf, "English" was no longer a feasible response to that query. "As a woman", she wrote, echoing Karl Marx, "I have no country ... my country is the whole world." England, remarked VS Pritchett, was parasitic on life abroad but didn't want to recognise the fact. The most parochial nations, then as now, are those with their military hardware in every continent. This book closes, then, with a survey of the gradual globalisation of the English-language novel, as the empire writes back.

Nation and Novel combines a huge range of materials with a remarkably steady focus. It is an erudite, judicious study, though one that could do with a touch more imaginative flair. It is not a book one would go to for mind-warping theories or daringly original readings. Parrinder is not the most arm-chancing of critics, and at his flattest is to be found here baldly recounting plots. Like most academic critics these days, he pays scant regard to the intricacies of literary form, an art that seems to have gone the way of thatching and clog-dancing. With impeccable correctness, he sees national identity as provisional and diverse, without really asking whether it isn't time to ring down the curtain on the whole concept. James and Conrad receive curiously casual attention, as does DH Lawrence's astonishingly avant-garde novel Women in Love

Yet the book is crammed with perceptive passages - on 18th-century footpads, the Book of Job, Disraeli as political novelist, Jane Austen as hard-headed materialist, the politics of marriage, Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time as Arthurian allegory. Its lucid, level-headed prose makes it just the right kind of text for students, and the fact that Englishness is a subject only slightly less fashionable in English departments than gender-bending and body-piercing will do it no harm at all.

(Terry Eagleton's The English Novel: An Introduction is published by Blackwell)