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The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists by Adrian Poole & The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel edited by Robert L. Caserio

by
April 2011, no. 330

The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists by Adrian Poole

Cambridge University Press, $69.95 pb, 479 pp

Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600)

The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel edited by Robert L. Caserio

Cambridge University Press, $46.95 pb, 299 pp

The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists by Adrian Poole & The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel edited by Robert L. Caserio

by
April 2011, no. 330

While spying in Scotland in 1706, Daniel Defoe wrote a letter to the queen’s secretary of state explaining his technique: ‘I Talk to Everybody in Their Own Way.’ In his energetic and instructive introduction to The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists, Adrian Poole takes Defoe’s declaration as a neat summation of the novelist’s method. It was following the success of Robinson Crusoe that the word ‘novelist’ was first recorded in the OED, heralding an art form whose great virtue has been its receptivity to all kinds of experience, its mimicry of all manner of voices: rich, poor, black, white, male, female.

Sarah Kanowski reviews 'The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists' edited by Adrian Poole and 'The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel' edited by Robert L. Caserio

The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists

by Adrian Poole

Cambridge University Press, $69.95 pb, 479 pp

Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600)

The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel

edited by Robert L. Caserio

Cambridge University Press, $46.95 pb, 299 pp

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