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.”

Rohan Maitzen's profile page

Rohan Maitzen is Associate Professor of English at Dalhousie University.

“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