The Victorian Art of Fiction presents important Victorian statements on the form and 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 where 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. Among the featured essayists and critics are John Ruskin, Walter Bagehot, George Henry Lewes, Leslie Stephen, Anthony Trollope, and Robert Louis Stevenson; the classic essays include George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” and Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction.”
Comments
“The aura of the magnificent novels of the Victorians sometimes obscures the analytic thinking about the genre that one knows had to accompany all the imaginative glory. Too often it is only the amusing obtuse contemporary review that gets remembered. From the year of Vanity Fair (1848) until Henry James’s proto-modern “Art of Fiction” of 1884, Rohan Maitzen’s important new anthology drawn from Victorian periodicals gives us the critical work that accompanied and shaped mid-Victorian fiction. A clear introduction and concise and accurate notes contextualize and enhance the criticism, and make this a book that should be useful for years to come.” — David Latané, Virginia Commonwealth University
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Texts
Introduction
- Anonymous, Review of Jane Eyre
Christian Remembrancer (1848)
- David Masson, Thackeray and Dickens
North British Review (1851)
- George Henry Lewes, The Lady Novelists
Westminster Review (1852)
- Anonymous, The Progress of Fiction as an Art
Westminster Review (1853)
- Theodore Martin, Thackeray’s Works
Westminster Review (1853)
- C.W. Russell, Novel-Morality: The Novels of 1853
Dublin Review (1853)
- Margaret Oliphant, Modern Novelists—Great and Small
Blackwood’s Magazine (1855)
- Marian Evans [George Eliot], The Natural History of German Life
Westminster Review (1856)
- Marian Evans [George Eliot], Silly Novels by Lady Novelists
Westminster Review (1856)
- W.R. Greg, False Morality of Lady Novelists
National Review (1859)
- David Masson, from
British Novelists and Their Styles (1859)
- Walter Bagehot, The Novels of George Eliot
National Review (1860)
- Henry Mansel, Sensation Novels
Quarterly Review (1863)
- Justin McCarthy, Modern Novelists: Charles Dickens
Westminster Review (1864)
- George Henry Lewes, Criticism in Relation to Novels
Fortnightly Review (1866)
- R.H. Hutton, The Empire of Novels
The Spectator (1869)
- Edward Dowden, George Eliot
Contemporary Review (1872)
- Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library: Charlotte Brontë
Cornhill Magazine (1877)
- Anthony Trollope, Novel-Reading
The Nineteenth Century (1879)
- John Ruskin, Fiction—Fair and Foul
The Nineteenth Century (1880)
- Robert Louis Stevenson, A Humble Remonstrance
Longman’s Magazine (1884)
- Henry James, The Art of Fiction
Longman’s Magazine (1884)
Biographical Notes
Works Cited and Further Reading
Sources
Author Index
Rohan Maitzen is Associate Professor of English at Dalhousie University.
