Authors whose works are discussed in this collaborative book, covering a 'long' nineteenth century, include Sterne, Fielding, Scott, Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily BrontA Gaskell, Dickens, George Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, and Lawrence. Most of the chapters focus on a single work, among them Tristram Shandy, Wuthering Heights, Bleak House, Middlemarch and Lord Jim, asking why, in the end, does this novel matter, and what does it invite us to 'see'. The contributors examine aspects of narrative technique which are crucial to interpretation, and which bring something new or distinctive into fiction. The introduction asks whether such experimentation may be driven by challenges to society's 'master narratives' - for instance, by a desire to circumvent the reader's ideological defences - and whether, in a radical model of canon-formation, such narrative innovation may be an aspect of canonicity.

Contents: Introduction; How pleasant to meet Mr. Fielding: the narrator as hero in Tom Jones, W.B. Hutchings; 'Where then lies the difference?': the (ante)-postmodernity of Tristram Shandy, Jayne Lewis; Old Mortality: editor and narrator, Mary Wedd; Mathilda - who knew too much, Frederick Burwick; 'Perswasion' in Persuasion, Jane Stabler; Wuthering Heights as bifurcated novel, Frederick Burwick; Negotiating Mary Barton, Richard Gravil; Nell, Alice, Lizzie: three sisters amid the grotesque, Alan Shelston; The androgyny of Bleak House, Richard Gravil; Middlemarch and 'the Home Epic', Nicola Trott; The ghost of doubt: writing speech and language in Lord Jim, Gerard Barrett; Liking or disliking: Woolf, Conrad, Lawrence, Michael O'Neill; Index.