The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume Four: The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880-1940. Patrick Parrinder and Andrzej Gasiorek, editors. Oxford University Press. £85.00. xxv + 633 pages. ISBN 978-0-19955933-6. This coUection of thirty-six essays looks at an interesting period in the history of novels - the end of the survivors of the mid- Victorian era such as Trollope and the introduction of radically different writers, e.g. Bennett, Woolf, Henry James, Forster, Lawrence and so on. The actual writing and puhlisbing of novels changed as the three-decker vanished and cheaper editions appeared while free libraries and increasing literacy widened the market: in 1880, 380 new novels were published; by 1895, there were 1,315. (Indeed the volume is very good at discussing the 'nuts and bolts' of writing and publishing.) The contents are divided into six parts which examine: the production of novels; the period 1880-1914 and the works produced, e.g. metropolitan fiction, 'new women', bestselling fiction; specialised formats, e.g. detective stories, adventure novels, science fiction, children's books, short stories and utopian romances; a survey of the period 1914-1940 with essays on James Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, modernism, cinema, the Empire, and the war; fiction in the Celtic Fringe, EngUsh regional and EngUsh working-class fiction; and finally, three papers on the critical understanding of fiction which take a wider look at the novel and the society which produced it. This is an amazingly varied collection which approaches an admittedly vast field with readable scholarship and panache. (T.A.L.)