What is THE great British Novel?

[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.