The World Novel in English to 1950 ─ The World Novel in English to 1950

The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a twelve-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the "literary" novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and tendencies.

Volume Nine: The World Novel to 1950 traces the development of the "world novel," that is, English-language novels written throughout the world except for in Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey essays and essays on major writers, as well as essays on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed.The World Novel to 1950 covers periods from Renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains essays on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.

Ralph Crane is Professor and Head of English at the University of Tasmania, Australia. He was educated at the University of Wales, Swansea, the University of Victoria, BC, and the University of Tasmania. He worked in universities in New Zealand for 14 years before taking up his current position in 2004. He has published widely on colonial and postcolonial fictions, and has written or edited 21 books, including scholarly editions of several Anglo-Indian texts. His most recent books areCave: Nature and Culture and a new scholarly edition of R.M. Ballantyne'sThe Coral Island (both with Lisa Fletcher).
Jane Stafford teaches English at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of essays and articles on colonial and New Zealand literature and is the co-author ofMaoriland: New Zealand Literature, 1872-1914 and the co-editor of The Auckland University Press Anthology of NewZealand Literature.

Mark Williams teaches English at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. He was educated at Auckland University and at the University of British Columbia, where he gained a Ph.D. in 1983. He has taught at several universities in New Zealand and was a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo. Mark has published numerous articles, edited books, and monographs on New Zealand, modern, and postcolonial literature, includingLeaving the Highway: Six Contemporary New Zealand Novelists, Patrick White, andThe Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature. He lives in Wellington and is married to Jane Stafford.