A WRITER raised in a Chinese fishing village has been shortlisted for the Pounds 30,000 Orange Prize for women's fiction. Xiaolu Guo, 33, wrote her firstnovel in English only five years after moving to London. She is up against five other writers,...

Recent literary scholarship has responded to contemporary theoretical pressures in a variety of ways. While most take issue with the interpretive conventions of the recent past, like Tolstoy's unhappy families they do so in their own ways. The range can be great, as...

Remember when literary criticism was a frightening discipline, austere and combative? Its devotees were in the grip of implacable theory, or buried deep in the “text”—that sunless realm where books are forgotten, readers irrelevant and authors dead. Split into feuding factions, the high priests of...

Remember when literary criticism was a frightening discipline, austere and combative? Its devotees were in the grip of implacable theory, or buried deep in the “text”—that sunless realm where books are forgotten, readers irrelevant and authors dead. Split into feuding factions, the high priests of...

In the essay that follows, Backscheider examines some methods of influencing other people, particularly men, and bringing about change that female authors of early novels gave to their female characters.

In the following essay, Warner charts the novel's progress from "scandalous" newcomer on the literary landscape to a serious, legitimate form sanctioned by the efforts of such key figures as Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, and Clara Reeve.

In the following essay, Davis argues that early novelists put forth concepts of fiction that implicitly sought to disarm a public that paradoxically both demanded fiction and looked down upon "untruthful" tales.