<p><strong>'Stephen Regan's hefty collection of essays on the 19th century novel is indispensable to any course on Victorian literature.'</strong> - <em>Times Higher Education Supplement</em><br /><br /><strong>'This compendium of sixty or so essays provides every angle on fiction anyone could possibly want, with unobtrusive orientation for less experienced students of literature.'</strong> - <em>Joy Alexander, Use of English</em></p>
The Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Critical Reader provides a comprehensive selection of contemporary and modern essays on the most important novels of the period. By bringing together a range of material written across two centuries, it offers an insight into the changing reception of realist fiction and a discussion of how complex debates about the meaning and function of realism informed and shaped the kind of fiction that was written in the nineteenth century. The novels discussed are: Northanger Abbey, Jane Eyre, Dombey and Son, Middlemarch, Far From the Madding Crowd, Germinal, Madame Bovary, The Woman in White, The Portrait of a Lady, The Awakening, Dracula, Heart of Darkness.