Literary Studies

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

by Sarah Kanowski •

April 2011, no. 330

The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists by Adrian Poole

Cambridge University Press, $69.95 pb, 479 pp

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

Cambridge University Press, $46.95 pb, 299 pp

Literary Studies

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

by Sarah Kanowski •

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

Sarah Kanowski is a writer, editor, and broadcaster. She is the new editor of Island magazine, the literary quarterly based in Tasmania and addressed to readers and writers across the world. Sarah has worked extensively at ABC Radio National, primarily on the Late Night Live, Saturday Extra, and Encounter programs. She holds a Masters of Philosophy in English Studies from Oxford University. Having begun life as a Queenslander, with time spent in Latin America, she wonders how much further south fate will carry her.