Harry Shaw's aim is to promote a fuller understanding of nineteenth-century historical fiction by revealing its formal possibilities and limitations. His wide-ranging book establishes a typology of the ways in which history was used in prose fiction during the nineteenth century, examining major works by Sir Walter Scott-the first modern historical novelist-and by Balzac, Hugo, Anatole France, Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens, and Tolstoy.

Harry E. Shaw is Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot, also published by Cornell University Press, and coauthor of Reading the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Austen to Eliot.