Publisher's Synopsis
Readers and teachers of Victorian fiction make many assumptions about realism, about characterization and gender stereotypes, about sensationalism and about social criticism. This collection guides the reader to a more thorough understanding of the significance of these and other issues, in the early and mid-Victorian novel. The introductions and notes aim to make this study one of the most accessible guides to mid-Victorian attitudes and theories. Extracts from contemporary criticism are reprinted, covering a considerable diversity of subjects, to demonstrate what the educated Victorian regarded as important literary issues of the day.;The low esteem in which post-Jamesian critics of the 1890s, and later, held early and mid-Victorian criticism, accompanies a turning-away from social and political aspects of the novel, such as the social origins of fiction, the expansion of the reading public, and speculation concerning the determination of fictional form and content by social and economic factors.
