A Companion to the Victorian Novel

Victorian novels remain enormously popular today: some continue to be made into films, while authors such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot are firmly established in the canon and taught at all levels. These works have also attracted a great deal of critical attention, with much current scholarship examining the novel in relation to its historical, political, and cultural contexts. This reference book is an introductory guide to the Victorian novel, its background, and its legacy. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and offers a fresh account of past, current, and new directions in scholarship.

The volume is divided into several broad sections, with chapters in each section treating more specialized topics. The first section looks at the emergence of the Victorian novel and its literary precursors, with particular emphasis on the growth of serialization and the development of the novel of syndication. The second explores significant social and cultural facets of nineteenth-century British literature, while the third discusses the principal features of different genres, such as ghost stories, the Gothic, detective fiction, the social problem novel, and contemporary film adaptations. Individual authors are examined in the fourth section, while the fifth overviews various critical approaches and their application to nineteenth-century fiction.

WILLIAM BAKER is Professor, Department of English, and Professor, University Libraries, at Northern Illinois University. He is the Editor of George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, as well as the author or editor of such volumes as Harold Pinter (1973), George Eliot and Judaism (1975), The Libraries of George Eliot and G. H. Lewes (1981), F.R. Leavis and Q.D. Leavis: An Annotated Bibliography (1989), The Early History of the London Library (1992), The Letters of George Henry Lewes (1995, 1999), Literary Theories: A Case Study in Critical Performance (1996), and The Letters of Wilkie Collins (1999).KENNETH WOMACK is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Altoona. In addition to coauthoring Recent Work in Critical Theory, 1989-1995: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood, 1996) and Twentieth-Century Bibliography and Textual Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood, 2000), and coediting the Dictionary of Literary Biography's three-volume British Book Collectors and Bibliographers series (1997-1999), he has published numerous articles on twentieth-century British and American literature and film. He is editor of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory, correspondent for the World Shakespeare Bibliography, and associate editor of George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies.