A Companion to the Victorian Novel

The Companion to the Victorian Novel provides contextual and critical information about the entire range of British fiction published between 1837 and 1901.

• Provides contextual and critical information about the entire range of British fiction published during the Victorian period.
• Explains issues such as Victorian religions, class structure, and Darwinism to those who are unfamiliar with them.
• Comprises original, accessible chapters written by renowned and emerging scholars in the field of Victorian studies.
• Ideal for students and researchers seeking up-to-the-minute coverage of contexts and trends, or as a starting point for a survey course.

Patrick Brantlinger is Rudy Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (1998), Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain 1694–1994 (1996), Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914 (1990), and Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (1990).

William B. Thesing is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He is the author of The London Muse: Victorian Poetic Responses to the City (1982) and the editor of five volumes in Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography: Victorian Prose Writers before 1867 (1986), Victorian Prose Writers after 1867 (1987), Victorian Women Poets (1998), British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880–1914: The Realist Tradition (1994), and Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British Women Poets (2001). He recently edited Caverns of Night: Coal Mines in Art, Literature, and Film (2000).