The Rise of the Novel

"It’s a remarkable work. It’s the first post-war conceptualisation of the English novel in its 18th-century inaugural moment, and it’s still the way in which one can think about the specific problems of English fiction – even though the novel is a highly international form, the literary form that is probably least inflected by specific national peculiarities. Vargas Llosa is writing in South America, Solzhenitsyn is writing in Russia, and you have this sense of a global community of novelists. While Ian Watt acknowledges that, he emphasises specifically English properties of the form. He helps me in my attempts to understand English national peculiarities… Like the English version or versions of anti-Semitism, but also the nature of the engagement between the English novel and censorship. I try to root that engagement in certain properties which are specific to English literature. I could glibly say, ‘I refer you to my book.’ It’s different in many respects. It’s innovative – the blood libel first happened in England, the first national expulsion of Jews happened in England, so it’s innovative in the most lethal sense. But also in the sense that it’s in England that a kind of moderate and contained anti-Semitism takes root – one that is not threatening to the security of the Jews, although it’s somewhat diminishing of their morale. It’s also in England that the principal vehicle of anti-Semitism is literature. These are some of the ways in which English anti-Semitism is distinct. In some respects it’s more subtle, and in others it’s not subtle at all. There’s nothing subtle, for example, about Caryl Churchill’s play, Seven Jewish Children . There is a minor spat going on in The Guardian between Jonathan Freedland and Caryl Churchill and me. Freedland wrote a piece on anti-Semitism, Churchill responded, I responded to her response."