Preface.

1. What is a Novel?.

2. Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift.

3. Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson.

4. Laurence Sterne.

5. Walter Scott and Jane Austen.

6. The Brontës.

7. Charles Dickens.

8. George Eliot.

9. Thomas Hardy.

10. Henry James.

11. Joseph Conrad.

12. D.H. Lawrence.

13. James Joyce.

14. Virginia Woolf.

Postcript: After the Wake.

Notes.

Index

"Eagleton's presentation of the history of the novel is admirably clear and almost entirely free of the disfiguring jargon so relied upon by theorists and bamboozlers."
The Irish Independentà


"Eagleton, almost alone among academic literary critics of his generation, has never been afraid of asking big questions about big things. In The English Novel: An Introduction he takes aim at a very large target indeed. Being Eagleton (the most articulately and discriminately ideological critic of our time) he does, of course, do much more than merely 'introduce'. He makes sense of the English novel."
John Sutherland, Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature, UCL

Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester. His recent publications include Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2003), The Idea of Culture (2000), Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (1999), Literary Theory: An Introduction (Second Edition, 1996) and The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), all published by Blackwell Publishing.

T. Eagleton, University of Manchester