A History of English Prose Fiction

The book offers a chronological survey of English prose fiction, tracing its evolution from medieval chivalric romances—synthesizing northern, classical, and eastern legendary elements—through Chaucer and Elizabethan writers, Puritan allegory and the Restoration, into the eighteenth-century rise of the novel and its innovators, and onward to nineteenth-century varieties such as novels of manners, historical fiction, social-purpose narratives, and fanciful romances. It situates literary change in social, religious, and institutional contexts, describes representative styles (including obscure earlier texts) so general readers can apprehend them, and assesses the uses and misuses of fiction rather than providing exhaustive authorial criticism.