Most undergraduate literature courses begin with a compulsory survey course on the novel. The Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Critical Reader fills a real gap in the market as no other book provides such a comprehensive selection of contemporary & modern essays & reviews on the most important novels of the period. By bringing together a range of material written across two centuries it offers an insight into the changing reception of realist fiction & a discussion of how complex debates about the meaning & function of realism informed & shaped the kind of fiction that was written in the nineteenth century. The novels discussed are: Northanger Abbey Jane Eyre Dombey & Son Middlemarch Far From the Madding Crowd Germinal Madame Bovary The Woman in White The Portrait of a Lady The Awakening Dracula Heart of Darkness.