Includes index

From Arthurian romance to Richardson. The mediaeval romancers and story-tellers ; The Spanish influence ; The Elizabethans ; The historical allegory and the French influence ; The Restoration ; Literary forms that contributed to the novel ; The passing of the old romance ; Daniel Defoe -- The eighteenth-century realists. Samuel Richardson ; Henry Fielding ; The novel versus the drama ; Tobias Smollett ; Laurence Sterne ; The minor novelists : Sarah Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith -- From "Humphry Clinker" to "Waverley". The imitators ; The novel of purpose ; The light transcript of contemporary manners ; The Gothic romance ; The historical romance ; Jane Austen : the critic of romance and of manners -- Nineteenth-century romance. Sir Walter Scott and the historical novel ; Scott's legacy ; The romance of war ; James Fenimore Cooper and the romance of the forest and the sea ; The renovation of Gothic romance -- The realistic reaction. The minor humorists and the author of "Pickwick" ; Charles Dickens and the humanitarian novel -- The return to realism. William Makepeace Thackeray ; Bulwer-Lytton in the role of realist, George Borrow, Charles Reade ; Anthony Trollope ; Charlotte Bronte -- The psychological novel. Elizabeth Gaskell : the ethical formula of the psychologists ; George Eliot ; George Meredith -- The contemporary novel. Henry James and impressionism ; Philosophical realism : Mrs. Humphry Ward and Thomas Hardy ; Robert Louis Stevenson and the revival of romance ; Rudyard Kipling ; Conclusion.