'Each chapter lucidly summarizes important critical texts as well as writers of the time, including Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and Apra Behn. The author offers a comprehensive yet concise overview of the rise of the novel that will benefit students and teachers of English literature. Recommended reading.' - Choice 'A remarkably comprehensive, lucid, and well-organised account of 'rise of the novel' criticism from the later seventeenth century to the present. Its judgements about the main lines of this criticism, and its assessments of the issues at stake, are judicious and convincing.' - Shaun Regan, Queen's University Belfast, UK 'The 'rise of the novel' is one of the most contested areas in modern criticism - there's little agreement on what constitutes a 'novel' and when, how, even whether it 'rose.' Mountains of scholarship have been published on the subject, and pity the poor beginner who has to make sense of it. Nicholas Seager deserves thanks for this gentle but rigorous introduction to the arguments over the eighteenth-century novel, a learned, wide-ranging, and scrupulously fair overview of the major accounts of the form.' - Jack Lynch, Rutgers University, USA
