‘The Idea Embodied in the Cosmology’: the Significance of Dorothy Van Ghent’s The English Novel: Form and Function

Abstract

For the past few decades the teaching of fiction in England and the United States has been radically affected by the appearance of two books: Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) and Dorothy Van Ghent’s The English Novel: Form and Function (1953). While Booth may be more widely discussed in professional forums, Van Ghent is the more influential in terms of her effects upon the teaching of fiction in America and England. Van Ghent’s essays have provided models for teachers of fiction on how to approach a novel in terms of its organizing aesthetic principles. Prior to Van Ghent, high school courses discussed plot in terms of the students’ own lives, while undergraduate novel courses wavered uneasily between plot synopsis, biography, history, and sociology.