What is THE great British Novel?

[kelby_lake]

Using the concept of The American Novel- a book that is inextricably American- what about British equivalents?

[Lulim]

I am all for Middlemarch :)

[LitNetIsGreat]

Popular consensus will probably go for Dickens or the Brontes, but I will like to suggest Austen or Hardy, and of those I prefer Hardy.

[TheFifthElement]

Ignore me, missed the point entirely. Dur.

[Lokasenna]

Crikey, I can see this thread going on for awhile!

Even just working within the bounds of the novel form, there's so many to choose from!

Suffice it to say that I think a hypothetical shortlist should include Defoe's Moll Flanders, Godwin's Caleb Williams, Austen's Persuasion, Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Dickens' Great Expectations, Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings (but only if it can be taken as a whole).

And those are only the ones that leap immediately to mind...

[JBI]

Oh, most certainly Ivanhoe...

Seriously, what's next? The Great Turks and Caicos Novel?

This isn't the way to judge literature - it reminds me almost of the mediocre film critics who give things a rating out of 5 - quite frankly, that isn't criticism, it is a waste of time.

[TheFifthElement]

Oh, it just occurred to me:

Lord of the Rings

[kelby_lake]

Oh, most certainly Ivanhoe...

Seriously, what's next? The Great Turks and Caicos Novel?

This isn't the way to judge literature - it reminds me almost of the mediocre film critics who give things a rating out of 5 - quite frankly, that isn't criticism, it is a waste of time.

It's literature as being a side or the identity of a country. Which best sums up a place?

[kilted exile]

Y'know JBI if you dont like the thread you are free to ignore it. People will discuss what they want to discuss, and if th someone wants to discuss what the definitive Turks & Caicos novel is they will (and should) start a thread about it. Your opinion on the worthiness of a particular thread is really pretty unimportant.

Now, on to the important part of the post

The problem I see with our discussion here is probably going to be first deciding what qualities make something particularly british ( a thorny discussion because despite being a very small island there are more regional differences than in countries many times its size.

Just because I think it deserves a mention I think Rob Roy may be the definitive Scottish Novel, however, I dont see it as particularly british

[dafydd manton]

The best British novel? How long is a piece of string? Three Brontes, one Dickens, an Orwell or so, Dickens, the list goes on and on.

[Hank Stamper]

Y'know JBI if you dont like the thread you are free to ignore it. People will discuss what they want to discuss, and if th someone wants to discuss what the definitive Turks & Caicos novel is they will (and should) start a thread about it.

+1 :thumbs_up

as for the great British novel.. much has already been mentioned.. Austen, Dickens, Hardy, Eliot, the Brontes, etc

if i was going to pick one then it is probably a toss up between Great Expectations and Jane Eyre - not necessarily the greatest, but two books that immediately come to mind when thinking about books that best represent Britishness.. add Robinson Crusoe to that as well...

[Emmy Castrol]

I like D. H. Lawrence and his portrayal of a changing England; one stuck between the old class system and modern industrialisation. So perhaps 'Women in Love'.
Or perhaps 'Wuthering Heights' which paints a beautiful story within a such lovely landscape. Not a big fan of Austen, nothing but unrealistic self-fantasy hidden behind fanciful language.

[The Grim]

Though a joyful act of reflection, I could never limit my choice to even five, let alone one. It is simply amazing how much great literature has come out of that little island.

[Virgil]

Using the concept of The American Novel- a book that is inextricably American- what about British equivalents?

Haha, I think I suggested this in the other thread. :D

So I think the "Great British novel" would have to be not just by a British author but something that strikes someone as inherently British, sort of like a national epic like The Illiad or The Aenieid or Beowulf.

As which novels fit, here are a few off the top of my head:
Tom Jones, Great Expectations, Middlemarch, Tess of the D'Ubervilles, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Brideshead Revisted, and Vanity Fair.

[Emil Miller]

Although it is not the book that I would take with me to the proverbial Desert Island, I think that Wuthering Heights must be a serious consideration for THE great British novel. In my view, nowhere in English literature has the pain of unrequited love been more graphicaly expressed than in the doomed relationship between Cathy and Heathcliffe.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Although it is not the book that I would take with me to the proverbial Desert Island, I think that Wuthering Heights must be a serious consideration for THE great British novel. In my view, nowhere in English literature has the pain of unrequited love been more graphicaly expressed than in the doomed relationship between Cathy and Heathcliffe.

Yes I think that is the best British novel, but whether that is fundermentally British (whatever that means) I don't know.

[Scheherazade]

Just realised that even though I did not have any problem coming up with couple of titles for "the American novel", I am having trouble thinking of such a British book.

[Virgil]

Although it is not the book that I would take with me to the proverbial Desert Island, I think that Wuthering Heights must be a serious consideration for THE great British novel. In my view, nowhere in English literature has the pain of unrequited love been more graphicaly expressed than in the doomed relationship between Cathy and Heathcliffe.

Oh good point. I do think that would qualify. What can be more British than the moors? :D

[JBI]

It's literature as being a side or the identity of a country. Which best sums up a place?

Why not get more to the grain? "America is nothing but a bunch a Bible-preaching, Burger-bulged-belly belching, redneck gun freaks who can't seem to pay their debt." Or, something like that.

The notion of country, in itself, is younger than what we call countries. It really, in the European way of thinking, has more to do with linguistic restraint than with "national identity". As far as I know, even Britain has a division, with, North Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales all having a somewhat distinctly "national" in the sense you mean it, tradition. One cannot even ask the question, without taking into account that one work cannot sum up everything, or even come close, as naturally, it will leave people out.

Hell, I think the bulk of Italians, judging by their culture, agree that the most central prose text is Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi, by in 1827, Italy wasn't a country. Does that count?

What about German novels before Bismark? Is this the way we should categorize?

Traditions are important, but the central core of a tradition seems, often, rooted outside of the tradition. Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney, and even Chaucer were mixing Italian, and streaks of French. Milton, the definer of "The English Heroic Line", styled from Chaucer mind you, comes out, ultimately, of Classical traditions - the Bible, the Greeks, and the Romans (who in themselves weren't even unified countries mind you - from what I understand the "definitive" texts we have of Homer, even, were assembled in Alexandria, Egypt).


When I think of tradition, I think of a long conversation. That conversation however, is intertext between traditions, as everyone who communicates brings in their own personal voice, formed from different conversations and mentalities. The dominant image of the Waste Land, the "Unreal City", though pertaining to London, comes from Baudelaire, a Frenchman.

The harder you look, the thinner a national identity seems to be in literature. The very Idea of History, as we know it (excluding post-modern advancements in historical theory) seems itself 400-500 years old - national identity, maybe 200 years old (certainly a product of the Romantic movement though). Even the notion of "The West" feels arbitrarily constructed and false.


When one asks then, for the "novel" that sums up Britain the best, how can one possibly answer? Even Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare as we see him today until recently. The Shakespeare of Pope and Johnson is different from the Shakespeare of Keats and Shelley, and in turn is different than the Shakespeare of A. C. Bradley. Is he the centre of the English tradition? Does he best sum up the British Isles? Why do we even want to sum them up?


When it comes down to it, the problem is that we are arguing over THE great novel of x country, when we should be discussing the great novels of time itself, or perhaps of a certain language, given the peculiar necessity of such limitation. Wordsworth would have been nothing without Rousseau, remember that - his whole early philosophy comes out of Rousseau's work. Is he then speaking in the English voice, or the French? Is there even such a thing?

[Virgil]

Very good question JBI. I think I've suggested that it's akin to a national epic. Who knows if Homer really captured the time and place of The Illiad. But it attempts to. I purposed chose novels that seem to define a time and place, but of course it's one author's perspective.

[JBI]

Very good question JBI. I think I've suggested that it's akin to a national epic. Who knows if Homer really captured the time and place of The Illiad. But it attempts to. I purposed chose novels that seem to define a time and place, but of course it's one author's perspective.

The question though, is what country's epic was Homer writing? The only thing I can understand from all what I've read on the matter, is that his text, despite linguistic troubles (note, Greece at the time was not one country, and it was subject to many dialects and regional idiosyncrasies) was that, by chance politics ended up pushing Homer's status to that of speaker for a culture which, though feuding within itself, considered itself idiosyncratic to the rest of the known world (one thinks here of Persians). There was no nation behind the epic, only the seeds of what would transform itself into the "West" under Roman banners, and thereby adopt this text, since it is a great text after all, for many aesthetic reasons, notably its use of metaphor and simile, as the model of a tradition.

In truth, it seems strange that Greek thought, which we think of as Western, was lost to the "West", that is, western Christendom, until its "rediscovery" from Muslim (who ironically were pretty much as far west as one can go in Europe at this point), and East Christian preservation. The status it holds is not really national status.

I don't think one can consider Beowulf a national epic - it certainly doesn't talk to the way one sees English today. I think the closest England comes to an epic, that is English, is Shakespeare's plays, from Richard II through Henry VIII but even that speaks of one side of the story, and only a limited span of time. The Great Shakespeare Plays all seem to be set outside of England (with the exception of Henry IV).

Is the Aenied the epic of Rome? Is Rome a country? Is it the epic of Italy? One must ask these questions. I don't particularly think people thought that way back then - they probably just thought of it as a seperator between "us" and "them", Romans, who after all, beat the Greeks, and Greeks, whose culture they ripped off in one way or another.

In truth, all these ancient texts can't really be looked at in this way, I find. We seem to see things spatially, given that we are a written-based society, but these classics, even through Shakespeare's time, were from an Oral society, that favors Time and duration over Space and geography. I doubt he thought of himself as a "national bard", and I doubt Shakespeare thought of himself as a "national bard". Dante certainly didn't, unless we call Florence a country. And I don't think Cervantes really did either - certainly his regional stereotyping and prejudices would indicate as much.

What then, is behind this idea of nation, and national literature? I am sure it started in the Romantic period, but if I were to try and guess, from what I know, it comes out of the shift of dominance from the oral to the written. With the emerging of text-media over oral-media, language's role changes, and people naturally become grouped by language. Bring to that a rise in literacy, mostly in vernacular, and you get people artificially forging traditions from within linguistic boundaries. France pulls at all "French" people, Germany pulls at all German Speaking people (with religious problems and dialects complicating things), Italy pulls at everyone with Italian backgrounds, Greece with Greek, and through that, we have the emergence of national literature, and national traditions. I think it surely helped to have a shift away from the classics - in these conditions, it was naturally inevitable. Instead of relying on classic models as the superb, people began to rely on national figureheads. Geothe, Wordsworth, Robert Burns, Pushkin, Victor Hugo.

America comes last of course, because they don't have the linguistic division. That's why they need to assert themselves, because they share, and import from a culture they wish to be separate from. The answer, is declare a break from the tradition - and out of that, emerge Emerson and Whitman, bringing America into what it is now. Twain, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, they all follow. The notion of the Great American Novel ultimately is the Great American literary work that puts America on the stage against the rest of the world's traditions, in its origins mainly the British tradition - what it has become is the result of a change in historical perspective.

[Chris Marie]

;)I would have to vote for "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley.
It has content and style' although the ending could be happier.

[Nightshade]

Hichhiker's guide -- the one with all the rain (can't rember whioch one that is) I think that is distinctly british, wierd, full of rain and yet bizzarley amusing.
:D

[Tsuyoiko]

The Go-between by LP Hartley.

This novel represents something very dear to me about life in Britain: lazy summer afternoons. There's something very British about summer fetes, picnics, cricket or reclining on a riverbank with your sweetheart. This novel captures that atmosphere beautifully. Its nostalgic theme seems very British; we love to reminisce. And the plot is based around the problem of class, another very British notion. Even the obsession we British have with the weather can be found there ;-)

[oopsycandy]

I say Alice in Wonderland :D

Because I love it although I realise it won't qualify as serious literature and this won't qualify as an intelligent post lol

[mona amon]

I can't think of any particular great one. Remains of the Day springs to my mind as The Little English novel. :)

[kelby_lake]

The Go-between by LP Hartley.

This novel represents something very dear to me about life in Britain: lazy summer afternoons. There's something very British about summer fetes, picnics, cricket or reclining on a riverbank with your sweetheart. This novel captures that atmosphere beautifully. Its nostalgic theme seems very British; we love to reminisce. And the plot is based around the problem of class, another very British notion. Even the obsession we British have with the weather can be found there ;-)

Good nomination, I think.
Film-wise, it's probably be Brief Encounter as romanticised England of the '40's.


JBI, you think too much :)

[Emil Miller]

[QUOTE=kelby_lake;684865]Good nomination, I think.
Film-wise, it's probably be Brief Encounter as romanticised England of the '40s QUOTE]


What makes Brief Encounter the greatest British film ever made is the fact that it isn't at all romanticised even though the story might be described as romantic. It is an amazingly accurate almost documentary portrayal that shows exactly how people were in 1945 when it was made. For my money, Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson give the finest performances that I have ever seen on the screen and all of the supporting cast are absolutely perfect, but without the sensitive writing of Noel Coward, the fabulous black and white photography of Robert Krasker and briliant direction of the great David Lean,it would just be another "Woman's picture".

[kilted exile]

I think if we are talking definitively british we have to discount Austen straight off the bat. Her stories speak to the lives of a small subset of the population at her time, and next to nobody at all outside of England.

This is why Scott also has to be discounted, he writes too much to Scotland and neglects the rest of the UK.

[Whifflingpin]

"This is why Scott also has to be discounted, he writes too much to Scotland and neglects the rest of the UK."

Humph - As a lowland scot, Scott is well placed to speak for Britain - Anglo-norman by blood yet with strong sympathies towards the Celtic fringe. (OK, I admit it, Scott actually invented the Celtic identity.) However, one of his best known novels, "Ivanhoe" that has already being mentioned (maybe with tongue in cheek) is a celebration of Englishness, and some others of his novels are set in England.

Another Scot who attempted to speak for England equally with Scotland, and for all classes, was John Buchan, and he probably embodied what was best about the Britain of his period. Whether any of his novels would pass the Litnet critics' test of greatness is of course dubious - maybe "Mr Standfast."

And having mentioned Mr Standfast, I am amazed that no-one has mentioned Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress." That is the one.

[Wilde woman]

Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. Who's more British than King Arthur?

Although, after reading JBI's post, I concede that Malory borrows from a rather French chivalric tradition.

[Niamh]

Hichhiker's guide -- the one with all the rain (can't rember whioch one that is) I think that is distinctly british, wierd, full of rain and yet bizzarley amusing.
:D

Good thinking! And theres the whole thing about Tea.

I think Wild Woman has hit on something. :nod: and Kilted does have a point regarding Scott.
If we are thinking that line, than Brideshead revisited is also discounted.
I would go with Tom Jones by Feilding. I think it satirically portrays the british quite well!

[_Shannon_]

Brideshead Revisited or The Heart of The Matter... though I also think a strong case could be made for The Lord of The Rings...

[GX4146]

Brideshead Revisited and Mrs Dalloway

[kelby_lake]

[QUOTE=kelby_lake;684865]Good nomination, I think.
Film-wise, it's probably be Brief Encounter as romanticised England of the '40s QUOTE]


What makes Brief Encounter the greatest British film ever made is the fact that it isn't at all romanticised even though the story might be described as romantic. It is an amazingly accurate almost documentary portrayal that shows exactly how people were in 1945 when it was made. For my money, Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson give the finest performances that I have ever seen on the screen and all of the supporting cast are absolutely perfect, but without the sensitive writing of Noel Coward, the fabulous black and white photography of Robert Krasker and briliant direction of the great David Lean,it would just be another "Woman's picture".




No, I just mean from a modern perspective, that sort of stern morality and refinedness you get in Brief Encounter. Loved it.

Good point from kilted- I suppse the majority of people will choose English novels, but I didn't want to stop people picking seminal works from Wales, Scotland, and Ireland simply because I didn't know much about them.

[kilted exile]

Just to clarify I am not oposed by any means to the choice of an english novel - england after all does make up a large component of the UK. What I am opposed to however is a "manor house" type story. I would not disagree out of hand with choices like Defoe's Moll Flanders or the works of many other victorian writers however.

This is just why I think we need to define what britishness is before we can come up with a novel we think best encapsulates it. (who knows the novel best encampassing "britain" may not have even been written by a brit.)

[Emil Miller]

This is just why I think we need to define what britishness is before we can come up with a novel we think best encapsulates it. (who knows the novel best encampassing "britain" may not have even been written by a brit.)

I don't think Britishness can be defined in any meaningful sense. After all, The Act of Union with Scotland was just a convenient device for getting around the dual monarchy situation. Personally, I am in favour of Scottish independence and ditto for the Welsh but, by the same token I would welcome English independence,.The idea of Great Britain holds little attraction for me and in France I am L'Anglais, in Germany I am Der Englander and in Italy L'Inglese. Up until 1945 I would have been proud of my English heritage but not subsequently; for an answer to that it is necessary to read my book Pro Bono Publico.

[Chris Marie]

"Brave New World" is a great British novel by Aldous Huxley.

Douglas Adam's books,esp. Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy are great British novels.

[wessexgirl]

I don't think Britishness can be defined in any meaningful sense. After all, The Act of Union with Scotland was just a convenient device for getting around the dual monarchy situation. Personally, I am in favour of Scottish independence and ditto for the Welsh but, by the same token I would welcome English independence,.The idea of Great Britain holds little attraction for me and in France I am L'Anglais, in Germany I am Der Englander and in Italy L'Inglese. Up until 1945 I would have been proud of my English heritage but not subsequently; for an answer to that it is necessary to read my book Pro Bono Publico.

Isn't this post dangerously close to politics? There are many statements I would like to address, but I fear we would be straying off-topic, (literary question) and into the realms of current (and past) political situations.

[Scheherazade]

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome.

[Hank Stamper]

Isn't this post dangerously close to politics? There are many statements I would like to address, but I fear we would be straying off-topic, (literary question) and into the realms of current (and past) political situations.

i would have said it sounds a bit more like self-promotion! ;)

i think the concept of Britishness is mostly bound up in the victorian era when the novel form became increasingly popular, and so is defined by ideas of empire and male hegemony and the misguided opinion that the British race was superior to everybody else, etc

im not sure Britishness really has any meaning today, apart from the olympics.. and even then it is pretty tenuous

so when i think of ideas of Britishness it is definitely (for me) confined to a historical viewpoint which I think probably stretches from the late eighteenth century right up to the end of world war II

[sofia82]

Very interesting point mentioned by JBI
To some extent I agree. We cannot identify something as pure literature of a country ... all the oral and even written literature are influencing each other not only the western literature but also the eastern too (a kind of intertexuality). Once I had a project about Chaucer Boccaccio and One and Thousand Nights. There were the same or similar stories in three books ... of course Chaucer got influenced by Decameron but there are some hints that there are other influences. On this point I agree with JBI, but any country needs to make itself identified by something called literature ... it is an identity for that. Something interesting... I think you heard about Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (Maulana) and there are some countries claiming he is their poet and not the others. There are classifications of this kind, even we have Irish literature, Scottish literature ... British ... but let it be what is the problem.
One more thing, now we have english literature and English literature ... english as those authors who are not from any english speaking countries but colonial world or just writing in English. And English literature as those written by an English author (British, Canadian, Australian, American ...) ... we are good classifiers in anything

[Emil Miller]

Isn't this post dangerously close to politics? There are many statements I would like to address, but I fear we would be straying off-topic, (literary question) and into the realms of current (and past) political situations.

Unfortunately there is a tendency for literary topics to stray into political and other areas and this one was already off-topic with the re-defining of British into regional literature. The original post asked " What is THE great British novel ?" Members can choose anything from the UK's constituent parts but have chosen to begin a debate about individual countries contributions rather than refer to them collectively as British literature. However, what is your choice for THE great British novel Wessex ?

[Mariamosis]

Popular consensus will probably go for Dickens or the Brontes, but I will like to suggest Austen or Hardy, and of those I prefer Hardy.

I would go for Dickens AND Hardy :)

[Mariamosis]

Why not get more to the grain? "America is nothing but a bunch a Bible-preaching, Burger-bulged-belly belching, redneck gun freaks who can't seem to pay their debt." Or, something like that.

I have to agree with this statement, and I am from the US. (and the southern states at that!) Ahem... although not to get into political views and such... :D

[DaveB]

JBI said, "Why not get more to the grain? "America is nothing but a bunch a Bible-preaching, Burger-bulged-belly belching, redneck gun freaks who can't seem to pay their debt." Or, something like that."

What a stupid, gratuitous thing to say.

[blp]

Vanity Fair

[wessexgirl]

Unfortunately there is a tendency for literary topics to stray into political and other areas and this one was already off-topic with the re-defining of British into regional literature. The original post asked " What is THE great British novel ?" Members can choose anything from the UK's constituent parts but have chosen to begin a debate about individual countries contributions rather than refer to them collectively as British literature. However, what is your choice for THE great British novel Wessex ?

I haven't got one. There are lots of British books that I love, but I can't narrow it down to one. I think there are elements in lots of works which I see as being typical of a certain place or time when they were written, e.g. I think of Victorian England with Dickens, rural Wessex and the condition of agricultural workers with Hardy, the industrial North with Gaskell, the upper classes in the '20s with Waugh, the need for women to find a husband in the early 19th century with Austen etc. all illustrating the social conditions of the country at that time. I can't think of a Scottish or Welsh novel off the top of my head, as I can't think of any I have read, (unless I think of Scott and Ivanhoe, and that was set in England). I have read Dubliners from Joyce, (which incidentally I loved), which also reflected the era and the place it was written in.

But great literature is great literature wherever its from, and I think I said as much in the thread on the "Great American novel". I can see that external conditions like environment and conditions can define a novels country, but when all is said and done, people are the same everywhere, which is why I think I don't tend to go for the illusion of the great (insert country) novel.

[Pryderi Agni]

For me, it has to be Dickens' David Copperfield. What a wonderful book.

[wessexgirl]

JBI said, "Why not get more to the grain? "America is nothing but a bunch a Bible-preaching, Burger-bulged-belly belching, redneck gun freaks who can't seem to pay their debt." Or, something like that."

What a stupid, gratuitous thing to say.

Wasn't it meant ironically? I may be wrong, but perhaps JBI was showing the narrowness of stereotyping a country? (Sorry to misinterpret if you weren't JBI).

[kelby_lake]

I read it in context and I said something about literature that 'sums up' a country.
Anyhow, if it says nothing about a place and a spirit, what's the point?

Maybe there's something with British colonialism that might count?

[Mariamosis]

Wasn't it meant ironically? I may be wrong, but perhaps JBI was showing the narrowness of stereotyping a country? (Sorry to misinterpret if you weren't JBI).

Yes, I would think that it was meant ironically, but in the town I live in... not so much. Although as a "disclaimer": it is obviously stereotypical.

[ksotikoula]

My favorite is Jane Eyre. It made me love literature in general.
That makes it very special for me, although I don't know if it qualifies it to be considered THE British novel.

[JBI]

Wasn't it meant ironically? I may be wrong, but perhaps JBI was showing the narrowness of stereotyping a country? (Sorry to misinterpret if you weren't JBI).

It was intended to be ironic, mocking the concept of a "book that best sums up a country."

I merely tried to point out the absurdity of the whole concept, by radically stereotyping Americans (I perhaps should have done it about Brits, perhaps it was in bad taste).

[quasimodo1]

The best English novel was The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by Irish expatriate James Joyce.

[jcjp]

Oh, most certainly Ivanhoe...

Seriously, what's next? The Great Turks and Caicos Novel?

This isn't the way to judge literature - it reminds me almost of the mediocre film critics who give things a rating out of 5 - quite frankly, that isn't criticism, it is a waste of time.

Agree with you there: I hate Puig's reviews in USA today just giving the reader 6-7 paragraphs on a film, not even telling whatever the plot is about (though I'm sure they can't do that out of contractual reasons or something or other)

Though Roger Ebert was relevant until the "Juno" review: lost respect from me and I'm sure from other people when he published that trite piece of trash.

ICK. Still sickens me, "Jason Reitman's "Juno" is just about the best movie of the year"

On topic:
British Literature is the one bit I have yet to roam and I do not plan to. I find most british writers (notably dickens) to be incredibly analytical without offering much basis behind whatever they're saying. Also, most of the writers of that period (yes, shakespeare included) just don't seem to "connect" with me--I'm not sure whether it's on a higher level or not, they just don't.

[WICKES]

I genuinely can't think of a single novel that really nails Britain. It would need to include the obsession with class: both in the sense of social position/ class war and in the more abstract sense of 'having class' or 'being classy' and the fear of being seen as rude, uncivilised and vulgar (which explains much of what foreigners find odd about British, and especially English, behaviour) ; being an island/ the island mentality; the weight (or burden?) of the past, both in terms of events and the build up of a rich, deep culture (this instills pride, but also a certain wistfulness- "look how good things once were- how great we once were" and cynicism "it's all been said and done before"); the irony (if Britain is anything, it is the home of irony), cynicism and reverence for humour (Bill Hicks, the American stand up, once said 'the difference between Britain and the USA is that Americans see humour as childish and distracting, the British take it seriously and regard it as hugely important); being the ruler of the largest Empire ever and then losing it all within a generation.

The island is an unusual and complex place- you could make a very strong case for Britain as the creator of the modern world: it was the birthplace of the industrial revolution, of urbanisation (the first country in the world to have the majority of its population living in towns and cities) of modern liberal democracy (if anyone is the father of Fukuyama's triumphant liberalism it is John Locke and if anyone was the voice of western liberal democracy against fascism and Communist dictatorship in the 20th century it was Winston Churchill ). Britain was also, arguably, the birthplace of modern science (Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Maxwell and Darwin... Darwin and Newton are two of the four most important scientists ever- along with Einstein and Galileo).

If I had to choose I'd go for something by Dickens or possibly George Eliot's Middlemarch.

Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh capture the humour, irony and cynicism that is so very British but they are too class- bound.

[kilted exile]

how about great expectations

[Niamh]

Bleak house even?

[Snowqueen]

My favorite is Jane Eyre. It made me love literature in general.

Wuthering Heights and Tess of D'uberville are the two great books in English Literature.

[prendrelemick]

WICKES' List of criteria are all more or less met by Zadie Smith's White Teeth.
It pulls in all the threads he mentions, AND it is a modern novel, unlike all of the suggestions above. (With the exception of Douglas Adams.)

I am a great fan of Austin, Dickens et al, but they are of a different country to the Britain I live in now. The difficulty is that the British have been so long at novel writing, that no one book or era can sum us up. White Teeth captures the hotch potch society of our post colonial muddled age, and does it with humour.

In the end I suppose you can only nominate your favourite British novel written by a Briton. So, Lord of the Rings, then.

[ksotikoula]

Wuthering Heights and Tess of D'uberville are the two great books in English Literature.

I agree I like Wuthering Heights and although I have not read yet Tess, having seen an adaptation of it and having read two other Hardy novels ("a pair of blue eyes" and "far from the madding crowd") I am certain that I will like it too. "Far from the madding crowd" is also a very nice book.

[Snowqueen]

I agree I like Wuthering Heights and although I have not read yet Tess, having seen an adaptation of it and having read two other Hardy novels ("a pair of blue eyes" and "far from the madding crowd")


Yes you should read Tess of D'uberville I am sure you will enjoy every bit of it.:)
I have also read Far From The Madding Crowd and just fell in love with Gabriel Oak. ;)

[PrinceMyshkin]

Oh, most certainly Ivanhoe...

Seriously, what's next? The Great Turks and Caicos Novel?

This isn't the way to judge literature - it reminds me almost of the mediocre film critics who give things a rating out of 5 - quite frankly, that isn't criticism, it is a waste of time.

Bravo! And may I nominate yours as THE great Canadian post!

[JBI]

Bravo! And may I nominate yours as THE great Canadian post!

Logos closing things is usually more interesting.

[kelby_lake]

Bravo! And may I nominate yours as THE great Canadian post!

:(

I didn't want to seem like a rubbishy critic. It's just to highlight the fact that novels aren't little contained things floating around nonchalantly- well, some might be- but inevitably connect to their country and or time. Some are very zeitgeist.

[MissScarlett]

I think many wonderful books could qualify as "the" great British novel, but I think I'd go with Middlemarch, though I like Wuthering Heights and Tess of the d'Ubervilles more.

[JBI]

:(

I didn't want to seem like a rubbishy critic. It's just to highlight the fact that novels aren't little contained things floating around nonchalantly- well, some might be- but inevitably connect to their country and or time. Some are very zeitgeist.

Yes, but from my perspective, these one-book formulai perpetuated by book Awards, and book clubs, where everyone reads the Great Book are reductive in themselves. The notion of one book being the great is ridiculous, to say the least. Ultimately someone is left out, and ultimately only one perspective, that of the author, can be expressed in one work (though the author can have a nuanced, pluralistic perspective). The Great Novel would undercut the tradition itself, by simply focusing its attention to the Great novel, where every novelist in history has had influences, both literary, and real life.

I don't see Dickens without his forerunners. I don't see D. H. Lawrence without the romantic tradition. I can't possibly see a single great novel, because a single great novel cannot exist without other single great novels coming before, and around it. The intertextuality of works makes focusing on one work, not only harmful, but also rather pointless.

Also, reduction to valuing art simply cuts its purpose down. Leave that for the posters on Amazon.com, who generally have no clue what they are talking about, or paraphrase/plagiarize from other mediocre critics. The goal of reading is to understand the texts' implications, and not to value it. The value comes from whether those implications are important, or whether or not the text speaks articulately, or interestingly. To give a value though, means that you need a criteria, and ultimately is negating the purpose of reading altogether.

[Scheherazade]

Yes, but from my perspective, these one-book formulai perpetuated by book Awards, and book clubs, where everyone reads the Great Book are reductive in themselves. The notion of one book being the great is ridiculous, to say the least. Ultimately someone is left out, and ultimately only one perspective, that of the author, can be expressed in one work (though the author can have a nuanced, pluralistic perspective). The Great Novel would undercut the tradition itself, by simply focusing its attention to the Great novel, where every novelist in history has had influences, both literary, and real life.Even though it might so, JBI, I personally cannot see what harm is done by discussing the merits (or shortcomings) of different books which might be considered suitable for such a title as "the greatest British/American/whatever book".

One might not consider Twilight series or Austen or King or Nancy Drew "worthy" but we cannot expect these books or any issues that we might consider "trivial" or "pointless" not to be discussed on the Forum.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Yes, but from my perspective, these one-book formulai perpetuated by book Awards, and book clubs, where everyone reads the Great Book are reductive in themselves. The notion of one book being the great is ridiculous, to say the least. Ultimately someone is left out, and ultimately only one perspective, that of the author, can be expressed in one work (though the author can have a nuanced, pluralistic perspective). The Great Novel would undercut the tradition itself, by simply focusing its attention to the Great novel, where every novelist in history has had influences, both literary, and real life.

I don't see Dickens without his forerunners. I don't see D. H. Lawrence without the romantic tradition. I can't possibly see a single great novel, because a single great novel cannot exist without other single great novels coming before, and around it. The intertextuality of works makes focusing on one work, not only harmful, but also rather pointless.

Also, reduction to valuing art simply cuts its purpose down. Leave that for the posters on Amazon.com, who generally have no clue what they are talking about, or paraphrase/plagiarize from other mediocre critics. The goal of reading is to understand the texts' implications, and not to value it. The value comes from whether those implications are important, or whether or not the text speaks articulately, or interestingly. To give a value though, means that you need a criteria, and ultimately is negating the purpose of reading altogether.

I see where you are coming from essentially. I certainly would agree about the intertextuality of art, it can't be tied down to one work as an author is influenced by everything they have read and the world around them, but I don't really see how this excludes the value of one particular text over another. Some works are still better than others.

[JBI]

I think you miss my point. I'm interested in discussing books, but I view books as how they relate to each other, as well as society. I don't think one book can accurately sum up one culture, and I don't think really that people should be particularly interested in the great book, and merely look at novels, and texts, as nodes on a long tree of other texts. To discuss, for instance, a book, is one thing. To discuss books against value is another, and ultimately negates the purpose of discussing books.

Simply put, books fall into three categories, 0, 1, 2. 0 is trash, 1 is mediocre, and 2 is good. That's pretty much how I see texts, to give a score out of 100 is to create an arbitrary criteria from which to judge texts, and, given the nature of texts, automatically makes things that break or challenge the criteria receive a lower score.

I don't read all books the same way, and no one really should. From that angle, it becomes impossible to accurately value texts against each other, and different novels serve different audiences and purposes. The term Great implies a way of achieving greatness, and quite simply, until someone can come up with a real way to judge such a thing (which, as of now, has had tons of ink spilled over it, without any results), and a real common aesthetic, than I think such questions are rather limiting, as they force one to approach books as seeking for greatness.


I see where you are coming from essentially. I certainly would agree about the intertextuality of art, it can't be tied down to one work as an author is influenced by everything they have read and the world around them, but I don't really see how this excludes the value of one particular text over another. Some works are still better than others.

Yes, but that does not really create a notion of the book that "Best sums up British culture" or whatever. All it does is limits reading. You can't really compare the value of Jane Austen against Charles Dickens. Both are superb authors. You can say both are great artists, and both were good at this or that, but to say Jane Austen is better than Dickens because is futile. Only the tradition can say so, and quite simply, the tradition will not say so in my life time. Dickens needed Jane Austen. Jane Austen needed Shakespeare, and Walter Scott. Shakespeare needed Marlowe. The tradition says yes, but the tradition needed more, and it negates the small players, but the tradition ultimately says that greatness isn't within one work, but within the tradition of works.

It's part of the game - it's like saying which line of a sonnet is the best - the sonnet is 14 lines, not one. Fiction is like that, the tradition is many books not one, and not one can stand out. We ignore things that we don't believe are central, but we need everything, and nothing can really achieve greatness without its predecessor. We would not read Eliot if not for his influences. We would not be able to read Thomas Hardy properly without the Bible, and his other influences. We simply could not read Angela Carter without her influences. How then can we say one book is the greatest.

Perhaps one can get close and say that there are better books between a series of works, but even so, the greatest? The greatest work implies some form of stagnation. Jane Austen's society has "come and gone with the flight of the swallow" to borrow Charles G. D. Roberts' phrase. She cannot possibly sum up England anymore. And in truth, in her day her works were considered limited only to the perspective of the "domestic" sphere by male and female readerships, and to not hold much excitement. Walter Scott is clearly the big novelist of that period, and pretty much the single most important, from a textual perspective, developer of the genre. But I don't see anyone here really chanting Ivanhoe (that's why I did, I thought it would be ironic).

How then could anything that isn't written today best sum up today's culture? But from there, we must ask, can one book sum up a culture? Was that even the point of the book itself? I doubt Austen would have thought so, and I doubt George Eliot, pretty much only writing about rural England would have thought so either. Surely the geography-rooted Hardy, who worked primarily in what he called Wessex, and experimented with regional dialects would disagree.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Yes I'm not really thinking about the great British/American novel question, I'm not even responding to the thread at all really, (that can't really work) but just the idea of the value of a particular novel/text. In your 0 1 2 sort of rating where does that leave Dante and Shakespeare? Where does it leave the real greats?

I don't think anyone will ever come up with a great way to place value upon a text, I don't believe you can or should because that only attempts to reduce the art. Like Wilde said "books are well written or badly written, that is all" but occasionally someone comes along who leaves us totally speechless. It could be in a whole play or novel, or just one line of poetry, but its brilliance is there to move us.

[JBI]

Yes I'm not really thinking about the great British/American novel question, I'm not even responding to the thread at all really, (that can't really work) but just the idea of the value of a particular novel/text. In your 0 1 2 sort of rating where does that leave Dante and Shakespeare? Where does it leave the real greats?

I don't think anyone will ever come up with a great way to place value upon a text, I don't believe you can or should because that only attempts to reduce the art. Like Wilde said "books are well written or badly written, that is all" but occasionally someone comes along who leaves us totally speechless. It could be in a whole play or novel, or just one line of poetry, but its brilliance is there to move us.

Those are all twos, and strong twos, but the point is, they aren't everything. I love Shakespeare, but I'm not a Shakespeare specialist by choice - I simply like to branch out, and love other things. There are 2s from all sorts of places. In terms of power of the text as a whole, I think someone could argue that the Man'yōshū is just as important, and just as worthy a text as the Arden Shakespeare (which in itself is a variant, of the Folio and Quarto Shakespeares, which in themselves are variants on the real Shakespeare). Every time I think of these great books, I can't help but think back to the episodes in James Joyce, where he has various characters reading Sir Walter Scott, a pretty much forgotten novelist now, though half of Edinburgh seems named after his novels. I personally value reading Jane Austen's Emma as much as reading Shakespeare's Othello. I can't possibly say which I like more.

Even Shakespeare creates a problem. If you take the plays for example, how can you compare them? Can we cut the sonnets down and say which one is the best? (I think most critics like 73, but that isn't the point). Can we say the Great Shakespeare Play is most certainly Hamlet, and King Lear is less important? Can we say, beyond that, the act 4 is the best act in the play, and that scene 2 of act 4 is the best scene in the play? See how absurd it becomes when you reduce like this.

The problem with classics, is, that when they are abused, as they have been abused in the past, notably the 18th century, they put shackles around contemporary perspectives, into viewing art as exemplified in one form. If something is the great, it becomes the model, and literature works better when it breaks models apart, rather than imitates them. Are we to say then, that since Hugo was the superb French novelist of his time, Balzac was less? are we even able to compare the two?

How can you possibly compare two writers from different backgrounds against a value system? How can you value a 18th century novel, against a 21st century one? What can you really compare that would get you a somewhat conclusive answer as to which is better? Nothing I can think of. Quite simply put, valuing literature is a secondary practice of criticism. The main purpose is to look into the text, the result is, that if one is looking into the text, they either think the text is worth looking into, or seek to debunk that notion. Either way, valuing texts is not a priority, the 0, 1, 2 scale seems far more useful to me.

I think, also, that when you put the work up onto a pedestal like that, it limits what you can say. I know many classmates, who were afraid to really criticize the works we were reading, because they were written by Shakespeare, and "great works". Shakespeare still had mistakes, and things he didn't do so well. There is still room to criticize, and to think, and that is the purpose. To value is merely to reduce things to positions of importance and provide a commercial value, rather than an aesthetic value, or a cultural value.

I don't know, I'll stick to the 0, 1, 2 - it seems to work for me. I think I'll probably be retiring from this thread soon at any rate, anyway. It seems pointless, as people are dragging things I put on the first couple of pages back up, and making me discuss them all over again.

[prendrelemick]

I know it is entirly subjective, but I can value one book over another by the amount of pleasure I get from reading it. No need for analysis of the text or its context.

[kelby_lake]

Part of it is to find out how people see Great Britain. Do you see miners from DH Lawrence or figures from Noel Coward plays? Scottish? Irish? Welsh? English?

We can use books to see how people see the world differently.

[JBI]

Part of it is to find out how people see Great Britain. Do you see miners from DH Lawrence or figures from Noel Coward plays? Scottish? Irish? Welsh? English?

We can use books to see how people see the world differently.

And the main point of difference, is one perspective is perhaps no better than the other. Perspective implies that there is no one "true" answer but many. In that sense, the tradition creates a general idea, and the more specific you get, the better sense you can have a time period, or location. Therefore, someone who is a Milton expert, would most likely know the major players of and around Milton, in order to sense where he is coming from, and what his role in the tradition of the time period was. They would also know his influence, and the effect he had on the culture. They would note his influences, and where he got ideas - the politics of his time, his childhood, etc. That is how you know something, not by saying one thing is greater or not. The more you look into something, the better you understand it.

To see how the world sees things differently, you must get rid of the assumption of one truth, since clearly difference negates that notion. In that sense, each novel is a perspective, and some perhaps are better to the current taste, but I can't think that one is truly the best.

[mgv1208]

I didnt read through the entire thread, but I'm assuming it wasnt mentioned.
Money by Martin Amis

[Darcy88]

In my humble opinion it is Wuthering Heights. The power of Bronte's masterful plot, descriptions, characterizations, dialogue - EVERYTHING - makes me wish the book was 1000 pages long every time I finish it. I imagine her writing a book like 100 Years of Solitude using those families and having the length of Karamazov or Don Quixote. I think such a book would go down as the greatest book ever written on many critic's lists.

It has the frankness of a television soap opera and the complexity of a 4th year coarse in rocket science. I am often saddened by the fact that she died so young. Hers is one of the most tragic early deaths in all history, literary or otherwise. That book marks a high ridge in the progression not just of literature but of feminism.

I love that book. Even with its short length it would still be one of my "desert" island books.

[peggynevers]

Hi,Friends;
I will like to suggest Austen or Hardy, and of those I prefer Hardy.

[Kafka's Crow]

I don't know. As an outsider I'd say it's got to be something by Dickens or George Eliot or Jane Eyre. As an insider it is got to be something by Irwine Welsh. The fact of the matter is that Britain is many countries. Class system still rules supreme in spite of all the rhetoric from the Liberal Left. British class system is one of the uglier realities of life. Which Britain are we talking about? Britain of Welsh or the hooligans or the middle class Guardian-reading chattering class or the snobs. There is a whole gamut of human situation to be seen lying between the extremities of yobs and snobs. If America is about different regions and locales, Britain is all about different classes.

I have a favourite British novel though, John Cowper Powys's A Glastonbury Romance:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Glastonbury-Romance-John-Cowper-Powys/dp/0715636480/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342625377&sr=8-1

[kelby_lake]

If America is about different regions and locales, Britain is all about different classes.



I like the concept of class as a feature of British literature.

[stlukesguild]

I would go with Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy which plays with... deconstructs the elements of the novel... at the point of the novel's very inception. The book is also outrageous, outrageously funny, and one of the best tales of friendship ever penned.

[Paulclem]

I like the concept of class as a feature of British literature.

There are loads of novels that are class based, or class reverential, or which deal with the peculiarities of certain aspects of class from Austen's books on the societies of middle and upper to Orwell's socialist The Road to Wigan Pier to, dare I say Rowling's HP series. It has proved a fantastic vein to mine, but the real fact of the class system is at best annoying but worst prejudicial and discriminatory. I suppose the best literature comes from conflict.

[Kafka's Crow]

There are loads of novels that are class based, or class reverential, or which deal with the peculiarities of certain aspects of class from Austen's books on the societies of middle and upper to Orwell's socialist The Road to Wigan Pier to, dare I say Rowling's HP series. It has proved a fantastic vein to mine, but the real fact of the class system is at best annoying but worst prejudicial and discriminatory. I suppose the best literature comes from conflict.

And British class system becomes even more complicated with the arrival of immigrants and ethnic minorities. They are consigned to the working class by the huge broom of British system but then there are the second generation immigrants who are doing amazing things, deconstructing this life-sentence that their parents had to spend their lives in regardless of their capabilities and aspirations. In this respect America is a hugely more mobile and benign society. The lack of class system gives Americans freedom to write about their natural surroundings, their territory, its history (Southern novel), its sense of wonder and fear ("Woods are lovely dark and deep" or Hemingway's Lost Generation, lost but never too lost to mention and wonder at where they are at the time the narrative unfolds, whether in Spain or Cuba or Paris or Kenya, the sense of locale is concrete.) The New York Trilogy is all well and good, can you imagine some one, some day writing a Manchester Quartet?

British novel, compared to novels written in other literary traditions, feels ossified by the struggle of fitting in or surviving in a class. This gives English novel in particular and literature in general its typical parochialism. Nobody would have written The Moviegoer in Britain. There would never have been a Walker Percy or Dostoevsky or even Leo Tolstoy in Britain. Life is too concrete, in your face and and real here as nothing changes. Zola would have felt suffocated in this environment. Life is so concrete and static that no other system of thought but utilitarianism would have survived here hence the Great British traditions of Realism and Utilitarianism. Heck, even Joyce would have killed himself here by jumping off Putney Bridge into sluggish and dirty waters below. No wonder the great Irish novelists chose France, Italy and even Germany over England as their workshops.

[crusoe]

"Bleak House" by Dickens

[Samsa]

I always thought that the Great American Novel was supposed to be the work that best represented the zeitgeist of a particular era in American history.

If we're looking for a British equivalent then I'd probably pick something by Dickens, although it's hard to choose one title. Then there's Vanity Fair by Thackeray and Middlemarch by George Elliot and maybe even something like E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. They're all cliched answers but I think they all fit the description rather well. Sure, they may neglect to mention huge sections of society but so do all the Great American Novels.

The only problem I can see is that the United Kingdom has a very old and very convoluted history, whilst the United States is a relatively young nation that was founded on a specific set of ideals. Being British myself, I don't think that we have any equivalent to the American Dream or 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. There's not much of a sense of being British or even of being English unless it's during the World Cup or something like that.

[tonywalt]

Somerset Maugham's - Razor's Edge was way ahead of it's time.

His short stories caputure the British Colonial experience perfectly - "The Outstation" springs to mind.

[prendrelemick]

The book I would most like to be The Great British Novel is White teeth by Zadie Smith. It ticks most of the boxes -Colonial Past, Class, Religion, Immigration, Ecentricity, Liberalism, Comedy - it's all there, it's how I'd like us to be, it's how I would like us to be seen. But because it is so recent it already feels dated and doesn't feel Great. And that's the trouble, in 50 years it may become a timeless classic.

[Emil Miller]

Somerset Maugham's - Razor's Edge was way ahead of it's time.

His short stories caputure the British Colonial experience perfectly - "The Outstation" springs to mind.

Totally agree, the Outstation is brilliant in that it shows that the upper-class snob turns out to be right while the socialist with a chip on his shoulder gets murdered for his pains. Other great stories within the genre are Footsteps in the Jungle, The Door of Opportunity and P&O, but any of Maugham's stories are not only immensely readable but full of human psychology as well.

[Paulclem]

And British class system becomes even more complicated with the arrival of immigrants and ethnic minorities. They are consigned to the working class by the huge broom of British system but then there are the second generation immigrants who are doing amazing things, deconstructing this life-sentence that their parents had to spend their lives in regardless of their capabilities and aspirations. In this respect America is a hugely more mobile and benign society. The lack of class system gives Americans freedom to write about their natural surroundings, their territory, its history (Southern novel), its sense of wonder and fear ("Woods are lovely dark and deep" or Hemingway's Lost Generation, lost but never too lost to mention and wonder at where they are at the time the narrative unfolds, whether in Spain or Cuba or Paris or Kenya, the sense of locale is concrete.) The New York Trilogy is all well and good, can you imagine some one, some day writing a Manchester Quartet?

British novel, compared to novels written in other literary traditions, feels ossified by the struggle of fitting in or surviving in a class. This gives English novel in particular and literature in general its typical parochialism. Nobody would have written The Moviegoer in Britain. There would never have been a Walker Percy or Dostoevsky or even Leo Tolstoy in Britain. Life is too concrete, in your face and and real here as nothing changes. Zola would have felt suffocated in this environment. Life is so concrete and static that no other system of thought but utilitarianism would have survived here hence the Great British traditions of Realism and Utilitarianism. Heck, even Joyce would have killed himself here by jumping off Putney Bridge into sluggish and dirty waters below. No wonder the great Irish novelists chose France, Italy and even Germany over England as their workshops.

I agree with the effect immigration is having. I was talking to my wife about it yesterday - the immigrants coming into our poor working class areas are having a beneficial effect. We're onto second and third generation Indians and Pakistanis, and their extended family structures are so very strong that they are now developing into a significant part of the middles classes.

I think for that reason I don't think you can say that life is so static now - in urban areas anyway. There's still the ossification you talk about in various strata in the country - and this has been embodied in the countryside alliance supporting foxhunting, but seeming to think they embody something timeless and "natural" about the country. As a result they refer to urbanites like myself as townies... as they strut about in their 4x4 s.

[Emil Miller]

Leaving short stories aside, the novel I would nominate would be Wuthering Heights. It has a great story and shows a deep insight into the human psyche.
Many readers of this novel are never quite the same afterwards.

[Paulclem]

I would agree with you there Emil. It is such a powerful story. I read it as a self obsessed young bloke, but it still made a great impression on me. It also seems to rise above a simple class depiction as well. Heathcliff is also a kind of Gypsey/ outsider/ immigrant to the moors as well.

[Emil Miller]

I would agree with you there Emil. It is such a powerful story. I read it as a self obsessed young bloke, but it still made a great impression on me. It also seems to rise above a simple class depiction as well. Heathcliff is also a kind of Gypsey/ outsider/ immigrant to the moors as well.

Yes I think that Heathcliff is a major literary creation that transcends social barriers and is a force within himself. The one thing that keeps the force from imploding is his love for Kathy and this is at the heart of the novel.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

What is THE great British Novel?

Not sure, but I bet it's boring!

[kelby_lake]

I always thought that the Great American Novel was supposed to be the work that best represented the zeitgeist of a particular era in American history.

Yes, that's what the question's getting at, although it's not so much a zeitgeist but themes that run throughout American literature. The Great Gatsby captured the zeitgeist but it also contains themes that we associate with the "American spirit", whether that spirit is a construct or not.

Are there novels that we can consider as being indicative of the British spirit? And if not, why?

[Gladys]

Anyone for Henry James's The Golden Bowl? The behaviour of father and daughter is a masterpiece of subtlety.

Or is James a Yank?

[Emil Miller]

Anyone for Henry James's The Golden Bowl? The behaviour of father and daughter is a masterpiece of subtlety.

Or is James a Yank?

I think he is primarily an American although he spent a good deal of his life in England. The Golden Bowl was written before he took British nationality one year before he died and therefore, strictly speaking, it qualifies as an American novel.

[Alexander III]

Yes, that's what the question's getting at, although it's not so much a zeitgeist but themes that run throughout American literature. The Great Gatsby captured the zeitgeist but it also contains themes that we associate with the "American spirit", whether that spirit is a construct or not.

Are there novels that we can consider as being indicative of the British spirit? And if not, why?

In this case, I would say Brideshead Revisted; it is just british, though the British people really have changed in 90 years time.

[Oof]

"What is THE great British Novel?"

There is no such thing.

[Paulclem]

There's no harm in putting some suggestions, though it would be difficut to encompass Britishness in one novel.

[Motherof8]

Ithink the greatest is David Copperfield.

[mal4mac]

My vote is for Dickens, Great Expectations, today, if I have to pick one.

[KCurtis]

I like D. H. Lawrence and his portrayal of a changing England; one stuck between the old class system and modern industrialisation. So perhaps 'Women in Love'.
Or perhaps 'Wuthering Heights' which paints a beautiful story within a such lovely landscape. Not a big fan of Austen, nothing but unrealistic self-fantasy hidden behind fanciful language.

And you are entitled to your opinion-I am reading Pride and Prejiduce right now and find it very interesting.

[Buh4Bee]

Not sure, but I bet it's boring!

Now you sound American! :lol::lol:

[Emil Miller]

Now you sound American! :lol::lol:

But why not? The US has long been a Mecca for those with a short attention span who seek instant gratification. The animated cartoon and instant coffee are but two examples. Exceptions such as Herman Melville and Henry James merely underline the rule.

[smerdyakov]

Haven't heard anyone mention Trainspotting.
I think Saturday Night, Sunday Morning should also be given a mention.

[Buh4Bee]

But why not? The US has long been a Mecca for those with a short attention span who seek instant gratification. The animated cartoon and instant coffee are but two examples. Exceptions such as Herman Melville and Henry James merely underline the rule.

Sure, if you're the expert.

[Desolation]

I'm going to go with Mrs Dalloway...Because Woolf's the only major British writer that I've actually read, and Dalloway seems like a more fitting choice than To the Lighthouse.

[Alexander III]

But why not? The US has long been a Mecca for those with a short attention span who seek instant gratification. The animated cartoon and instant coffee are but two examples. Exceptions such as Herman Melville and Henry James merely underline the rule.

Well if you want to compare the low-born American and the low-born English, I think neither would come out on top. Need I reminde you of the whole chav culture? One should not insult another countries cults of retardation when plenty abound back home.

[Emil Miller]

Well if you want to compare the low-born American and the low-born English, I think neither would come out on top. Need I reminde you of the whole chav culture? One should not insult another countries cults of retardation when plenty abound back home.

Alas, I'm sorry to say that you are correct.

[KCurtis]

But why not? The US has long been a Mecca for those with a short attention span who seek instant gratification. The animated cartoon and instant coffee are but two examples. Exceptions such as Herman Melville and Henry James merely underline the rule.
Hey, don't include me in that generalization!!

[Brielle92]

My favourite one is Austen's Persuasion, but I'd have to go with either David Copperfield or Jane Eyre.

[kelby_lake]

I've just read Middlemarch, which is considered by some to be The Great British Novel, and I'm convinced that us English can't write epics. We can write long books with lots of people in them but all those epic themes about life...I don't think we can do it.

We do have a good tradition of satire though.

[Lykren]

I'll put a word in for Emma. Middlemarch seems like a good choice to me too, though. How doesn't it have epic themes about life?

[paradoxical]

Well if you want to compare the low-born American and the low-born English, I think neither would come out on top.

What do you mean by low-born and why do you always take these cheap shots at the poor and working class? Just like you always remind us that you are upper class.

It's really in bad taste and I think is a sign of immaturity (or perhaps insecurity?) on your part.

[kelby_lake]

I'll put a word in for Emma. Middlemarch seems like a good choice to me too, though. How doesn't it have epic themes about life?

It has some interesting themes about life but it doesn't really achieve the epic status. There are no tragic heroes. Lydgate and possibly Casaubon are the only real contenders but Casaubon is portrayed as too pathetic and Lydgate just fizzles out.

[kelby_lake]

It has some interesting themes about life but it doesn't really achieve the epic status. There are no tragic heroes. Lydgate and possibly Casaubon are the only real contenders but Casaubon is portrayed as too pathetic and Lydgate just fizzles out.

I think Eliot's novel is really an anti-epic, as she emphasises the importance of small acts and humble living rather than great ambitions. Anyone in Middlemarch with any ambition are punished.

[Lykren]

It has some interesting themes about life but it doesn't really achieve the epic status. There are no tragic heroes. Lydgate and possibly Casaubon are the only real contenders but Casaubon is portrayed as too pathetic and Lydgate just fizzles out.

I think Eliot's novel is really an anti-epic, as she emphasises the importance of small acts and humble living rather than great ambitions. Anyone in Middlemarch with any ambition are punished.


I think I'm working under a broader definition of an epic, namely, one that is a function of the scale and philosophical and moral scope of a work. I suppose yours is strictly speaking more accurate though.

[Seasider]

Why is there so often a tendency in threads like this to want to be hierarchical? Why do we always need a Number 1? So many posters have discussed the difficulty of comparing writers of different times and cultures. I think the only thing I got from Ayn Rand was a comparison must be between like and like or it is specious.Or as I seem to remember she says A is not B.

If you need a hierarchy compile a favourites list and put what you want at the top. Though I guarantee if you do it at different times in your life you will change your Number 1 often.

[sadhana]

What about Tom Jones? Bitish morals and culture are interwoven with the humaneness that English wrting is all about

[bookclover]

Mrs Dalloway (and anything from V. Woolf) I think.
However, Lighthouse keeping by Winterson deserves to be mentioned.
Oh...Anything from Jane Austen, she's an amazing writer.

[kelby_lake]

If you need a hierarchy compile a favourites list and put what you want at the top. Though I guarantee if you do it at different times in your life you will change your Number 1 often.

It's not so much a question of favourite novels but of novels that say something about British culture (though perhaps it would be more accurate to say English).

[dfloyd]

After all, he ordered his shirts from London.

Or any of the Ian Fleming James Bond novels.

[qimissung]

Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. Who's more British than King Arthur?

Although, after reading JBI's post, I concede that Malory borrows from a rather French chivalric tradition.

I would have to go with Le Morte d'Arthur. I can think of nothing more English.

[wordeater]

"Oliver Twist" maybe? Other candidates: "Gulliver's Travels", "Pride and Prejudice", "Wuthering Heights", "Tess of the d'Urbervilles", "Great Expectations", "Of Human Bondage"...

[kelby_lake]

"Oliver Twist" maybe?

Is that meant to be a good novel? I heard that the novel was quite minor compared to Dickens' other stuff.

[wordeater]

Is that meant to be a good novel? I heard that the novel was quite minor compared to Dickens' other stuff.

I prefer "A Tale of two Cities" myself, but a novel about the French Revolution can hardly be called typically British. That's why I also suggested "Great Expectations".

Still, I do like "Oliver Twist" as well because of the way the dark parts of London are portrayed, and because the innocent and pure Oliver is surrounded by some of the most gruesome literary characters.

[kelby_lake]

I'm reading Hard Times at the moment. It's pretty good actually.

[Pantagruel]

Is that meant to be a good novel? I heard that the novel was quite minor compared to Dickens' other stuff.

It's worth reading I think, full of social commentary and relatively short, too. What I didn't like about it is what I don't like about Dickens in general: his morally perfect characters, of which there are a lot. Perfect Oliver who swoons at the thought of evil-doing, perfect Rose, perfect, benevolent Mr Brownlow and their condescending attempt to 'save' the fallen Nancy. The flawed characters: Sikes, Fagin, Nancy, Dodger, Mr Bumble etc, are far more interesting and far more entertaining. The fate of the Artful Dodger was tragic.

This has probably already been mentioned but I think Vanity Fair would be a good candidate for Great British Novel. It's an epic, satirical, all-encompassing slice of early 19th century English life. It looks at poverty, gender, social mobility, the aristocracy, the Napoleonic war. It's also an excellent read.

[kelby_lake]

Vanity Fair is a good choice :)

[namenlose]

I believe no British novel could parallel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick or The Great Gatsby as an iconic book in the popular culture and literary tradition of its nation. Charles Dickens and Jane Austen composed several classics which are even today immensely popular and widely influent, but even their most famous works such as David Copperfield and Pride and Prejudice aren’t as effective in constituting a national myth as any of the three books previously cited, even though the complete works of Dickens may be able to surpass any competitor to the title of Great American Novel in that respect. Middlemarch, Tom Jones, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy and Vanity Fair are narratives of great scope in their own particular ways, but none of them is equal to Austen’s and Dickens’ works in that sense.

Perhaps the concept of a nation’s great novel is more intrinsically related to a cultural inclination of the American reading community than to a general literary pattern. Since the US began as an expansive country, but had no consistent literary tradition before the nineteenth century, the “great novel” may have been an American substitute to the national epic. As there is a certain preoccupation in the US about defining a national identity and creating popular icons, other works have been suggested in their respective periods as possible candidates to this title probably because of this.

[kev67]

What is the definition of the Great American Novel? I associate the term with American literature from around 1920 to 1970, but there is more to it than that, I suppose. If I knew the criteria of the Great American Novel, I would be better able to suggest a British equivalent.

[Jenny]

Using the concept of The American Novel- a book that is inextricably American- what about British equivalents?

Got to be Shakespeare related.

[SkyCetacean]

I won't pretend to be all that familiar with British literature, but I'm surprised that there's been such little reference to George Orwell, specifically, 1984. If we define a great -insert country- novel at something that is reflective of the culture at the time of writing and still holds influence over the culture of today, then 1984 is certainly a good place to start. (Brave New World too, but I see someone's already mentioned that) Orwell took what he saw as issues in his time... Nationalism, class stratification, etc. and translated them into a book (1984 is allegedly a cultural translation of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin) that would have a near-global influence both in Britain and around the world. It's an important work I think, and presumably reflects the direction which Orwell thought British society would take in the centuries to come.

[Jackson Richardson]

The Great English novel should say something about English society and culture, in the way I promessi sposi does about Italy or the Great American novels do about America.

Jane Austen is a wonderful writer but she is far, far too limited in her canvas for consideration.

No doubt some would say Middlemarch, but my choice would be Bleak House - a great vivid range against a passionate condemnation of the British legal (and class) system.

The Great Scots novel will be something different - early Sir Walter Scott, probably - Old Mortality?

[kelby_lake]

What is the definition of the Great American Novel? I associate the term with American literature from around 1920 to 1970, but there is more to it than that, I suppose. If I knew the criteria of the Great American Novel, I would be better able to suggest a British equivalent.

The Great American Novel is a novel written by an American that contains themes and concerns that are particularly American. Whilst it may speak to people of other cultures, it profoundly speaks to Americans. Many novels have had the term applied to them, such as Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, etc.

[kev67]

The Great American Novel is a novel written by an American that contains themes and concerns that are particularly American. Whilst it may speak to people of other cultures, it profoundly speaks to Americans. Many novels have had the term applied to them, such as Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, etc.

Why would Moby Dick be a Great American Novel? Most of the action takes place at sea, while whaling was not a uniquely American activity.

[kelby_lake]

Why would Moby Dick be a Great American Novel? Most of the action takes place at sea, while whaling was not a uniquely American activity.

The epic scope I guess. Wiki explains a bit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby_dick

[TheFifthElement]

The Great English novel should say something about English society and culture, in the way I promessi sposi does about Italy or the Great American novels do about America.

Jane Austen is a wonderful writer but she is far, far too limited in her canvas for consideration.

No doubt some would say Middlemarch, but my choice would be Bleak House - a great vivid range against a passionate condemnation of the British legal (and class) system.

The Great Scots novel will be something different - early Sir Walter Scott, probably - Old Mortality?
ruggerlad, I think you've got an interesting point here because the difficulty in establishing a great British novel, where the criteria is that it reflects in some way the national 'identity' is that the 'British' identity doesn't really exist. You might suggest a great 'English' novel or a great 'Scottish' novel or a great 'Welsh' novel, but what constitutes a 'British' novel? Even under the title of 'English' novel, you would have quite a dispirate range as the 'identity' of someone in the North of England can be quite different to someone in the South or Cornwall, to someone who is British-Asian etc, etc. In the absence of this cohesive identity (or even an illusion of such) how can a novel reflect it in its themes and concerns?

With this in mind, does a novel like Cloud Atlas which is a series of quite different stories, loosely interconnected, more accurately reflect the 'British' identity?

[Jackson Richardson]

It's a fun question to ask and discuss here.

I wonder about the term "The Great American Novel". I don't know where it was first used, but I get the feeling that it is a bit defensive, as though wanting to say "we can do just as well".

[kelby_lake]

It's a fun question to ask and discuss here.

I wonder about the term "The Great American Novel". I don't know where it was first used, but I get the feeling that it is a bit defensive, as though wanting to say "we can do just as well".

I think part of it is because America is comparatively young to some of the European countries. The Great American Novel is America asserting itself, trying to form a literary identity separate from European influences.

I also agree about the impossibility of being able to represent every country in Britain in one book. So maybe The Great English Novel would be easiest. However, I wanted to leave it open so people could discuss other GB countries as well (and what about Cornwall?).

[Jackson Richardson]

The Great Cornish Novel is of course Rebecca.

I'm not convinced that the cultural boundaries between the bits of the UK are that firm. I don't feel I'm reading a foreign novel when I'm reading Scott (which I don't do that often) but some Scots would put that down to English cultural imperialism on my part.

[MarkBastable]

What Ho, Jeeves!

[prendrelemick]

How Green was my valley. For Wales

How Green was my Valet. For the upper class Welsh.

[Jackson Richardson]

What Ho, Jeeves!

I've got Richard Usborne's Plum Sauce beside me and can confirm there is no such title. I take it you meant Right Ho! Jeeves.

I saw it in translation when on holiday in Italy. It was irresistible to buy Perfetto! Jeeves.

[MrBlue]

The Remains of the Day

[MarkBastable]

I've got Richard Usborne's Plum Sauce beside me and can confirm there is no such title. I take it you meant Right Ho! Jeeves.

I saw it in translation when on holiday in Italy. It was irresistible to buy Perfetto! Jeeves.

I think you mean Plum Source.

...fair call though.

And, actually, I wish I'd gone with my first thought which was Leave it to Psmith.

[WICKES]

Using the concept of The American Novel- a book that is inextricably American- what about British equivalents?

If you mean what is the greatest novel written by a Brtish novelist, I'd say perhaps Tom Jones, Middlemarch, Great Expectations, Women in Love, Sons and Lovers, To The Lighthouse...difficult.

But if you mean is there a British novel which has got the essence of Britain in the way that Huck Finn or the Great Gatsby have nailed the USA, I'm not sure there is one. It's an interesting question. Some would say PG Wodehouse, but he wrote about the upper classes. The majority of Brits (English, Scottish or Welsh) have more in common with the kinds of people you find in Orwell's 'Road to Wigan Pier' or Down and Out than Wodehouse or Waugh.

There isn't a British 'War and Peace' with characters from all social classes and all parts of Britain (private soldiers from the backstreets of Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Cardiff etc, Scottish aristocrats and suburban Londoners and so on).

However, I would say that PG Wodehouse expresses and very British humour. If you want to know why the British never fell for Fascism or Communism in the way many other Europeans did, read Wodehouse.

[prendrelemick]

However, I would say that PG Wodehouse expresses and very British humour. If you want to know why the British never fell for Fascism or Communism in the way many other Europeans did, read Wodehouse.


Wodehouse and the Nazis! Let's not go there.

[Emil Miller]

Wodehouse and the Nazis! Let's not go there.

Why not? Wodehouse was interned after being captured by German troops in France. Being fully aware that there were a great many people who were afraid for his safety, he made a broadcast, at the Germans' behest , that he wasn't being ill-treated in any way. Of course the Germans knew he was a famous author and used it as a propaganda exercise, but what else could he do but tell the truth?

[prendrelemick]

Why not? Wodehouse was interned after being captured by German troops in France. Being fully aware that there were a great many people who were afraid for his safety, he made a broadcast, at the Germans' behest , that he wasn't being ill-treated in any way. Of course the Germans knew he was a famous author and used it as a propaganda exercise, but what else could he do but tell the truth?


According to his MI5 file, recently released, he was in the pay of the Nazis and would've stood trial for treason had he returned to England.

However I agree with WICKES, he conveyed that essence of English humour that makes us such poor material for dictatorships.
In fact if you were looking for the Great British Character, rather than Novel, a mixture of Jeeves and Bertie would do.

[Emil Miller]

According to his MI5 file, recently released, he was in the pay of the Nazis and would've stood trial for treason had he returned to England.

However I agree with WICKES, he conveyed that essence of English humour that makes us such poor material for dictatorships.
In fact if you were looking for the Great British Character, rather than Novel, a mixture of Jeeves and Bertie would do.

A more unlikely spy it would be difficult to find. I attach as much importance to that file as I do to the British intelligence report of WMDs in Iraq.
In one of his pre-war novels he lampoons Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, just as he did to communism in another when one of his silly-*** young gadabouts falls for the daughter of one of the 'Heralds of the Red Dawn' who's an orator at Speakers Corner in London's Hyde Park.

[prendrelemick]

On balance, I think I agree with you.

It was the irony of WICKES' post - that he used Wodehouse to make his point - when the man himself became embroiled with the nazis, that struck me.

[Emil Miller]

On balance, I think I agree with you.

It was the irony of WICKES' post - that he used Wodehouse to make his point - when the man himself became embroiled with the nazis, that struck me.

The facts surrounding Wodehouse and the Nazis are almost as farcical as one of his own stories. When his internment was over and he was free to go, he couldn't get out of Germany as it was still at war. So he put up at the Adlon, the best hotel in Berlin. He could easily afford it as he was a very wealthy man.
This led some over zealous MI5 personnel to assume that he was being paid by the Germans, but he was using his own money that could only be transferred to him through German channels because of the war.


Even after the war, his life continued to be like something from one of his books if this extract from his Wickipedia entry is anything to go by:

Wodehouse's characters, however, were not always popular with the establishment, notably the foppish foolishness of Bertie Wooster. Papers released by the Public Record Office have disclosed that when Wodehouse was recommended in 1967 for the Order of the Companions of Honour, Sir Patrick Dean, the British ambassador in Washington, argued that it "would also give currency to a Bertie Wooster image of the British character which we are doing our best to eradicate."

[MarkBastable]

Much as it pains me to agree with Emil, I agree with Emil.

Another candidate: London Belongs to Me

[WICKES]

On balance, I think I agree with you.

It was the irony of WICKES' post - that he used Wodehouse to make his point - when the man himself became embroiled with the nazis, that struck me.

Wodehouse was no Nazi. He was completely uninterested in politics and bewildered at all the fuss. Everyone who knew him thought him extraordinarily unwordly. He was a product of a more innocent age- an Edwardian stranded in a world of screeching dictators. The world that shaped Wodehouse might have been insular, smug, complacent and so on, but it was not a place that fostered extremist thinking. It was a place that took peace, liberal democracy and scientific progress for granted. Nazism was so alien to Wodehouse that I don't think he was able to really understand it. I very much doubt he took it (or communism) seriously.

My point was that when the Fascists marched in some countries there were arguments and street battles. When they marched in Britain, people laughed (alright, a generalisation, but there is a lot of truth to it)

[Emil Miller]

Wodehouse was no Nazi. He was completely uninterested in politics and bewildered at all the fuss. Everyone who knew him thought him extraordinarily unwordly. He was a product of a more innocent age- an Edwardian stranded in a world of screeching dictators. The world that shaped Wodehouse might have been insular, smug, complacent and so on, but it was not a place that fostered extremist thinking. It was a place that took peace, liberal democracy and scientific progress for granted. Nazism was so alien to Wodehouse that I don't think he was able to really understand it. I very much doubt he took it (or communism) seriously.

My point was that when the Fascists marched in some countries there were arguments and street battles. When they marched in Britain, people laughed (alright, a generalisation, but there is a lot of truth to it)

One of the things that has long puzzled me is how Wodehouse, being from an ultra English gentleman's background, could have worked in American show business during it's most raucous period, that of the 1920s. Writing songs for shows among cigar-chomping producers and the denizens of Tin Pan Alley seemed to have left him completely unchanged whereas one might have thought 'unhinged' would have been the case.

[MarkBastable]

One of the things that has long puzzled me is how Wodehouse, being from an ultra English gentleman's background, could have worked in American show business during it's most raucous period, that of the 1920s. Writing songs for shows among cigar-chomping producers and the denizens of Tin Pan Alley seemed to have left him completely unchanged whereas one might have thought 'unhinged' would have been the case.

He learned at Dulwich College - as any bright kid will learn at an English public school - that you work with the system and thrive, or you oppose the system and strive, or you ignore the system and do what you like.

Wodehouse went for the last of the three, his entire life - though his diaries suggest that he thought he was doing the first of the three.

There's an argument that any artistically and commercially successful writer owes his success to failing to resolve those two approaches.

[Kjetil]

I believe no British novel could parallel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick or The Great Gatsby as an iconic book in the popular culture and literary tradition of its nation. Charles Dickens and Jane Austen composed several classics which are even today immensely popular and widely influent, but even their most famous works such as David Copperfield and Pride and Prejudice aren’t as effective in constituting a national myth as any of the three books previously cited, even though the complete works of Dickens may be able to surpass any competitor to the title of Great American Novel in that respect. Middlemarch, Tom Jones, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy and Vanity Fair are narratives of great scope in their own particular ways, but none of them is equal to Austen’s and Dickens’ works in that sense.

Perhaps the concept of a nation’s great novel is more intrinsically related to a cultural inclination of the American reading community than to a general literary pattern. Since the US began as an expansive country, but had no consistent literary tradition before the nineteenth century, the “great novel” may have been an American substitute to the national epic. As there is a certain preoccupation in the US about defining a national identity and creating popular icons, other works have been suggested in their respective periods as possible candidates to this title probably because of this.

Well, the English are in good company. What's the great French novel, in the above sense? Or German? Italian? Spanish? There isn't one. The notion seems peculiarly american, and even there, there is little consensus. Or maybe the notion is fundamentally only possible in a demoratic culture, which really only the american has been for the whole length of its existence?

[WICKES]

Well, the English are in good company. What's the great French novel, in the above sense? Or German? Italian? Spanish? There isn't one. The notion seems peculiarly american, and even there, there is little consensus.

Good post. I would suggest the Russians have such a novel in War and Peace...maybe.

In a way, although Britain is a much smaller and less populous country than the USA, it is more complex. For a start it is a very old culture. England has an unbroken culture going back to at least Chaucer, 700 years ago.


I do think anglo saxon literature (Beowulf, the Battle of Maldon etc) captures something of the British, and especially English, national character: a pessimistic, cynical, dark (but also cheerful) willingness to endure. It's extraordinary how that attitude lingers even to this day.

[Lykren]

Good post. I would suggest the Russians have such a novel in War and Peace...maybe.

In a way, although Britain is a much smaller and less populous country than the USA, it is more complex. For a start it is a very old culture. England has an unbroken culture going back to at least Chaucer, 700 years ago.




I agree that England's older culture would tend to produce multiple representative works reflecting the diversity of influence inevitable with such a long history.

However, in terms of single books representing a language - what about Don Quixote, I Promessi Sposi, Faust, and In Search of Lost Time?

[Eiseabhal]

There isn't any such thing as a British novel.

[mal4mac]

There isn't any such thing as a British novel.

This may be right - not British novel, but English novel, Scottish novel, etc...

Rob Roy & the Waverley Novels by Walter Scott range across England and Scotland, might they fit? Or are those Scottish novels providing a much wider perspective than Sassenach works :)

[manuscript]

it is 1984.

[kelby_lake]

Well, the English are in good company. What's the great French novel, in the above sense? Or German? Italian? Spanish? There isn't one. The notion seems peculiarly american, and even there, there is little consensus. Or maybe the notion is fundamentally only possible in a demoratic culture, which really only the american has been for the whole length of its existence?

The French have Les Miserables.
I can't think of a great Italian novel but The Divine Comedy has to be the great Italian literary work.

[kelby_lake]

This may be right - not British novel, but English novel, Scottish novel, etc...

Rob Roy & the Waverley Novels by Walter Scott range across England and Scotland, might they fit? Or are those Scottish novels providing a much wider perspective than Sassenach works :)

Yes, maybe English novel would be more accurate but it would be nice to see some suggestions of the other countries of Britain as well.

[manuscript]

Well, the English are in good company. What's the great French novel, in the above sense? Or German? Italian? Spanish? There isn't one. The notion seems peculiarly american, and even there, there is little consensus. Or maybe the notion is fundamentally only possible in a demoratic culture, which really only the american has been for the whole length of its existence?

i think that there may really be something in your idea that it is a particularly or at least especially american notion. i agree with you.

[mal4mac]

Yes, maybe English novel would be more accurate but it would be nice to see some suggestions of the other countries of Britain as well.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/books-and-poetry/your-100-best-scottish-novels

Of those I've read, besides the great Scott:

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan,
Lanark, Alasdair Gray

I've also read: Black and Blue, Ian Rankin, but I think the guy is over-rated and over-hyped, not a patch on the five above, a genre hack, not serious literature, not even that exciting, compared to Stevenson, Welsh, or Scott.

Is Scott the greatest British novelist?

[DianeAdams]

I think Rob Roy is a good choice, I hear you can't embody Englishness, but if you could, if there were such a thing as a national cultural identity, Scott's moderation, passion for honor and love of truth would be something close. But how about Hereward the Wake.

[Sreenan]

Modern times it would have to be Trainspotting or Acid House by Irvine Welsh. Without a doubt one of the best writers alive is Mr. Welsh. And as asked above if Scott is the great British novelist; I have to say that it is Welsh!

Classics wise there are far, far too many to name as many are inextricably British and have all been mentioned in this thread (I think.)

[kelby_lake]

Pride and Prejudice maybe? That's a very English book.

[Lykren]

Pride and Prejudice maybe? That's a very English book.

I concur. Austen's books would come first on my list of English novels, and then probably Middlemarch. Then maybe Brideshead Revisited, then Tom Jones...

[Jassy Melson]

I think Dickens' Great Expectations is the greatest British novel.

[ralfyman]

As mentioned by others, Middlemarch, Brideshead Revisited, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Tom Jones.

[Gladys]

I think Rob Roy is a good choice, I hear you can't embody Englishness, but if you could, if there were such a thing as a national cultural identity, Scott's moderation, passion for honor and love of truth would be something close.

Rob Roy was subject of the Literature Network Book Club a few years ago. Apparently, I alone thought it worth completing. The Scottish dialect is a bit daunting and the novel is light on subtlety.

I loved George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. I like to think there's more to the ending than the obvious.

My favourite is The Golden Bowl by the expatriate American, Henry James, with its exquisite marriage machinations.

[ashulman]

Middlemarch has to be in contention. Bleak House as well.

[mal4mac]

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,...

Greatest Irish novel? Maybe...

Brideshead Revisited and Tom Jones are good novels but I don't think stand up against Middlemarch, which I've just re-read. The latter is remarkable for the number of characters it portrays across all sectors of English society, in some depth, ... not only does it give a portrait of an artist as a young man, but also a portrait of a scientist as young man (who makes a very bad marriage), and a portrait of a young woman as a social reformer (who also makes a very bad marriage!) and the list goes on through iconic portrayals of builders, farmers, industrialists, religious nuts, vicars, doctors, lawyers, politicians, campaigning journalists, yokels, uneducated yokels, matriarchs, confidence men, misers, dried-up scholars, teachers, tally-ho aristocrats, mayors, layabout sons, gadabout daughters, lords, tramps... does any other novel have such breadth and depth? Also, it is set in a critical time of British history... around the time of the Victorian reform act when the power of the aristocracy was waning, and the middle class coming to prominence... nothing defines modern Britain better!

[WyattGwyon]

The suggestion of Wuthering Heights, mentioned several times in this thread, made me think of a little story Sergei Rachmaninoff told on the way to identifying the greatest pianist of his day (He claimed it was Josef Hoffman):

On a certain street in Paris, the first tailor who set up shop put this hyperbolic claim on his sign: "The best tailor in France." A couple of years later a second tailor started doing business a couple of blocks away, inscribing on his sign: "The best tailor in Paris." Still later a third tailor opened up shop halfway between the other two. His sign read: "The best tailor in this street." I think Anne Bronte was the best writer in that house.

[ennison]

Middlemarch is a great novel and very English as is Wuthering Heights. There is no such beast as the Great British Novel although there might be great novels from Britain.

[ajvenigalla]

There's Great Expectations, Middlemarch, The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities, as my own short list for Great British Novel, though there are obviously more

[Pike Bishop]

Top Twenty Greatest British/Irish novels:

1. Ulysses--James Joyce
2. Middlemarch--George Eliot
3. Nostromo--Joseph Conrad
4. Persuasion--Jane Austen
5. Jane Eyre--Charlotte Bronte
6. Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man--James Joyce
7. Mrs. Dalloway--Virginia Woolf
8. To the Lighthouse--Virginia Woolf
9. Bleak House--Charles Dickens
10. Watt/Molloy (Tie)--Samuel Beckett
11.. The Book of Evidence--John Banville
12. Heart of Darkness--Joseph Conrad
13. Brideshead Revisited--Evelyn Waugh
14.. Never Let Me Go--Kazuo Ishiguro
15. Ghostwritten--David Mitchell
16. Crash--J.G. Ballard
17. The Secret Agent--Joseph Conrad
18. The Good Soldier--Ford Madox Ford
19. The Waves--Virginia Woolf
20. The Sea--John Banville

Henry James was an American, so I refuse to cede his sublimely brilliant work to the Brits...;)

[Auddfoote]

Middlemarch .........Eliot brought her formidable acuity to the evocation of a very particular time