The English Novel in History: 1895-1920.

David Trotter sets himself no easy task in aiming to give an account of the development of fiction from 1895 to 1920, extending his survey to include a wider range of works than are usually considered (The Sheik as well as Women in Love and The Thirty-nine Steps as well as The Secret Agent) and taking as his basic interpretative technique a theory of inferential relevance rather than a decoding one. It should be said at once that he is far more successful than might have been thought possible; no reader, I imagine, will agree with everything that he says, but it is an indication of the quality of his thinking that one both needs and wants to read him most carefully where one starts by disagreeing with him.

His choice of Relevance Theory seems in practice more a firm rejection of those theories which concentrate on decoding and on the concept of fiction as a self-referential activity. He is in no doubt that novels are about the real world (he would feel no need for inverted commas about the …