The Victorian Novel

* Presents the most influential and significant critical writing on Victorian fiction. * Offers students careful guidance through the critical literature by means of a narrative framework. * Encourages students to engage with critical debates about Victorian literature. This guide looks at how the Victorian novel has been read over the past hundred years. Unlike other critical guides, it not only provides students with examples of significant strands of criticism, but also helps them to make sense of these articles and extracts by means of a narrative and critical framework. The novelists referred to are the acknowledged great names of Victorian fiction, including the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope. A short opening section describing and representing early critical responses is complemented by a longer second section looking at current themes in criticism, such as genre, gender, politics, science, language, the canon, and modes of production. The volume as a whole enhances students' critical repertoire, encourages them to recognise the situatedness of all criticism, and helps them to engage with critical debates about the Victorian novel. This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.