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 and modern essays and 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 and a discussion of how complex debates about the meaning and function of realism informed and shaped the kind of fiction that was written in the nineteenth century. The novels discussed are: Northanger Abbey, Jane Eyre, Dombey and 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.