Recent correspondence with a friend has prompted me to contemplate what books I would include in a semester-long course on the Modern British Novel.

My friend announced his intention to teach A Handful of Dust, which is my favourite of Evelyn Waugh’s early novels. Nonetheless, I couldn’t see myself teaching any novel by Waugh except his magnum opus, Brideshead Revisited. In my judgment, this is the greatest novel of the twentieth century and would have a sacrosanct place in any course that I were to teach on the Modern British Novel.

Intending to teach one text by Dickens (of course!), my friend said he was likely to select Great Expectations. This is a choice that would sorely tempt me also, though I might select A Tale of Two Cities instead, which would hardly be an adventurous choice, its being the bestselling of all Dickens’ works and probably the one which is taught most often. My rationale for choosing the obvious – apart from the obvious, i.e. that it’s a great novel – would be the desire that students receive Dickens’ insights on the nature of political revolution, the French Revolution in particular, but also the multifarious other secularist revolutions that have been made in the French Revolution’s image and have followed in its wake.

My friend intended to “take a stab at Joyce”, something which I have done also, though without much enjoyment. The only text by Joyce I’ve taught is Portrait of the Artist, which is the most accessible of his works and which establishes the creative template, rooted in hubris, that shapes his later works.

If we take “modern” as being anything from the Victorian period onwards, i.e. from 1837, other possibilities would be Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Jekyll & Hyde, Dorian Gray, The Man Who was Thursday and Nineteen Eighty-Four and/or Brave New World.

Come Rack! Come Rope! by R. H. Benson would be an excellent choice were the course to be taught at a Catholic college and would prove popular. It’s an historical novel, written just before World War One, which is set in Elizabethan England at a time of religious persecution.

Perhaps a little more controversially, I’d be tempted to avoid Graham Greene but would select something off the beaten track, such as The Quiet American, rather than The Power and the Glory, should I choose to include him. The former offers an intriguing contrast between Old World cynicism and New World naiveté which would be a good topic of conversation in the classroom.

I’d also teach one of the three novels in C. S. Lewis’ Ransom Trilogy. Any would serve but I’d be tempted to tackle That Hideous Strength. On the other hand, I probably wouldn’t (or couldn’t) include anything by Lewis’ great friend, J. R. R. Tolkien. This would not be due to Tolkien’s work not meriting a place on the syllabus in terms of its literary stature but simply that Tolkien’s works are not really novels and do not, therefore, qualify for a course on the Modern British Novel. The Lord of the Rings is really a prose epic and has more in common with the epics of Homer and Virgil, or Beowulf and the Norse Sagas. As for The Hobbit, it is a fairy story written for children, making it an awkward fit for the course we’re imagining.

Should we wish to broaden our panoramic horizons, we could extend the “modern” period back to 1815, the year of Waterloo, which would enable the inclusion of the works of the incomparable Miss Austen. In this case, my selection would probably be Sense and Sensibility, facilitating an engagement with the ideas of the Romantic movement and its reaction against the empiricism and rationalism of the Enlightenment. Austen’s nuanced approach to the tensions and differences between “sense” and “sensibility” would present the opportunity to discuss the philosophies of realism and relativism, a discussion that students in our confused and confusing times so sorely need.

The earlier date of 1815 would also permit the inclusion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a work which raises many issues of perennial relevance, including the dangers of scientism, and the differences between the Christian romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, on the one hand, and the secularist romanticism of Byron and Percy Shelley, on the other. Mary Shelley’s romantic novel would also prove to be an ideal foil for Jane Austen’s romance, each serving as a catalyst to reveal the animating ideas of the other.

Of the titles selected, Sense and Sensibility, Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and Dorian Gray have all been published in the Ignatius Critical Editions series. I’d assign these editions as the set texts, thereby avoiding those poisoned mainstream editions which pollute the minds of students with postmodern misreadings of the works in the accompanying essays and footnotes.

Having mused on what would be included in an imaginary college course on the Modern British Novel, I must thank my friend for prompting me to take this enjoyable flight of fancy and fictional fantasizing.

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