Studying novels

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One of the most common experience of students of English Literature is to read a novel and thoroughly enjoy it, but to be at an almost total loss to say what the book is really about or what things in it are most worthy of note. The natural tendency is then to rely on guidance from teachers or critics, but this is a poor substitute for constructing a personal response. developing an individual reading can, however, seem extraordinarily difficult to the average student, even to the student who is ‘good at English’.

How to Study a Novel by John Peck   takes the reader through a set of logical steps that show you how to respond to, interpret and develop your own view of a novel and how to present that response in an effective essay. 

Ever wanted to get to grips with some of the famous novelists to see what books can help you with your studies:

• Jane Austen
• Charles Dickens
• E.M. Forster

Jane Austen

If you are reading Jane Austen for the first time the peculiarity and limited social scope of her world can be off-putting and her concern with the fairly uneventful progress of her heroine can seem rather unimportant. Yet you quickly find that critics and teachers claim that these novels offer subtle and incisive social and moral analysis. What can seem far from clear is just how that is achieved and what form it takes. What makes these novels different from other enjoyable romantic fiction? Or, for those who don’t find this kind of fiction particularly appealing anyway, what makes them more than expressions of a narrow snobbery with no obvious relevance to a modern reader?

Vivien Jones  explores these and other questions in How to Study a Jane Austen Novel. Click here for more general information about Jane Austen.

 Charles Dickens

…The broadest pattern that can be observed in a novel is some kind of conflict between society and one or more individuals within that society. In Dickens’s novels, that conflict tends to be expressed as a tension between two opposed ideas: on the one hand we find a broad panorama of lust, greed, desire, show and affectation, and on the other, a sense of natural simplicity of spirit, of goodness and love for our fellow humans. This opposition can be simplified even further to the basic conflict between money on the one side, and love on the other.

Find out more in How to Study a Charles Dickens Novel by Keith Selby 

E.M. Forster

It is clear that Forster’s novels are marked by pressures and conflicts that extend beyond his personal life to his class and his time. They both conform to accepted literary expectations and beliefs about social reality inherited from the great Victorian novelists while simultaneously challenging them.

Find out more in How to Study an E. M. Forster Novel by Nigel Messenger 

Forster's novels have always given great pleasure to the general reader but they do present particular problems for those who wish to study them in a more systematic way. The elusiveness of Forster's irony, the complexity of his symbolism and the formal ambiguities in structure that are such a marked feature in all his novels, make any analysis surprisingly challenging. In this book, Nigel Messenger shows you how to set about this task.