The Victorian Art of Fiction

This concise, engaging anthology collects classic and lesser-known writings on Victorian fiction. ""The Victorian Art of Fiction"" presents important Victorian statements on the form and the function of fiction. The essays in this anthology address questions of genre, such as realism and sensationalism; questions of gender and authorship; questions of form, such as characterization, plot construction, and narration; and, questions about the morality of fiction. The editor discusses how Victorian writing on the novel has been placed in accounts of the history of criticism and then suggests some reasons for reconsidering this conventional evaluation. Essayists and critics include John Ruskin, Walter Bagehot, George Henry Lewes, Leslie Stephen, Anthony Trollope, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and such classic essays as George Eliot's ""Silly Novels by Lady Novelists"" and Henry James' ""The Art of Fiction"" are included. This is the most inexpensive, yet thorough, anthology of Victorian novel criticism available.