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 work is an introductory guide to the Victorian novel, its background, and its legacy. 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 and social and cultural facets of 19th-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 19th-century fiction.