Regarded as one of the greatest novelists of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens (1812-1870) created novels like David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations. Dickens was a prolific and extremely popular writer whose works were published in monthly installments with illustrations. As Foster notes, writers like Dickens did not necessarily think of themselves as artists but rather as entertainers and chroniclers of their society. Dickens’s novels aimed to be accessible to all social classes and to contain memorable characters, emotional situations, and criticism of social ills such as child labor and the flawed legal system. They often portrayed the harsh realities of poverty, although he began to lean toward happier endings in the latter half of his career. His books use striking imagery and symbols, reflecting his deeper themes, and unforgettable characters with names like Scrooge, Peggoty, and Mister Micawber.

Foster quotes from many Dickens works throughout to illustrate the Victorian novel’s structure, including its chapter divisions, cliffhangers, and happy endings. In addition, he examines Dickens’s use of emblems and motifs to establish the characters and themes of a story. For instance, Foster notes that the motif of fog in Bleak House illustrates its theme of the maddening opacity of bureaucracy. However, Foster criticizes Dickens for the novelist’s tendency to create tidy endings for all characters, no matter how minor. Though a firm and happy resolution are a feature of the Victorian aesthetic, Foster feels that the endings in Dickens novels sometimes do his classic narratives a disservice by wrappings things up in a hurry.

James Joyce (1882-1941) is considered one of the greatest Modernist writers of the early 20th century. The Irish novelist, poet, and playwright experimented with the stream-of-consciousness writing style, meandering plotlines, and an examination of the individual psyche in works such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922). Ulysses, inspired by Homer’s epic The Odyssey, traces a single day in the lives of three Dubliners: Leopold Bloom (mirroring Odysseus in the Homeric epic); his wife, Molly Bloom (mirroring Homer’s Penelope), and Stephen Dedalus (mirroring Homer’s Telemachus). The novel uses Joyce’s trademark inventiveness with language, long interior monologues, and run-on sentences.

Although Foster admits that Joyce is not the most accessible writer for many students, he nevertheless emphasizes Joyce’s contributions to the novel. Joyce broke away from Victorian concepts of chronological time, dramatic unity, and chapter divisions to show the novel’s capacity for reinvention. Additionally, Foster references Bloomsday, a day that honors Joyce and the novel Ulysses, to show how novels live unexpectedly in culture and memory. Bloomsday refers to June 16, 1904, the day in which Ulysses is set; June 16 was also the day that Joyce had his first date with his wife, Nora Barnes. Since 1954, Bloomsday has been an annual event in Dublin, Ireland, where people from all over the world gather on June 16 to celebrate Joyce and literature.

One of the most influential Modernist writers of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is renowned for her use of the stream-of-consciousness narrative style. Novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) are almost completely narrated in the stream-of-consciousness vein. Woolf is also known for her critical essays, her feminist writings, and her chronicling of mental health issues. Along with fellow novelist E. M. Forster and critic Lytton Strachey, Woolf was a core member of the Bloomsbury group, an influential salon of intellectuals and writers, so named because most of its members lived in and around Bloomsbury, London.

Foster discusses Woolf to show how her narrative style captures durational time as opposed to chronological time. In addition, he analyzes how Woolf uses emblems to signify her characters and themes, as well as how she recreates the spontaneous nature of memory and consciousness.

Russian American writer Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) is the author of well-known novels and short-story collections. His novels include Invitation to a Beheading (1935) and Pale Fire (1962). However, the most famous and controversial of his works is the 1955 novel Lolita, which unfolds from the perspective of fictional child sexual abuser Humbert Humbert. Nabokov is regarded as a stylistic genius and is known for his wordplay and metafictional, lyrical writing that challenges narrative conventions. For instance, Pale Fire is structured as a long poem by a fictional poet, complete with a commentary by the poet’s colleague.

Nabokov is among the writers who Foster most discusses, especially regarding linguistic innovation, charming antagonists, and the unreliable first-person narrator. Foster unpacks how Nabokov makes Humbert charming so that he is tolerable to readers. In addition, Foster shows how Nabokov’s word choices immediately evoke a character, a mood, and an entire theme.

Columbian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014), best known for novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), is considered one of the 20th century’s most important writers. Marquez’s novels have been translated from Spanish into multiple languages, and One Hundred Years of Solitude sold over 50 million copies worldwide. In addition to his play with language and nonlinear storytelling, Marquez is most known for his use of magical realism.

Foster discusses Marquez in the context of the novel’s history, highlighting how the author revitalized the genre. In addition, Foster analyzes Marquez’s world-building in One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which the magical Macondo seems real to readers because it is logically consistent with the worldview of the text’s universe.

An author who Foster references throughout the text, John Fowles (1926-2005) was a prominent English novelist known for his experiments with the novel’s narrative conventions. The major novels written by Fowles include The Collector (1963), The Magus (1965), and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). Fowles’s novels are diverse, their subjects ranging from a psychopath’s narrative about kidnapping and murdering a woman (The Collector) to an English teacher’s account of being stranded on a Greek island and unable to tell reality from fantasy (The Magus). His narrative style differs in each novel to suit the plot.

Foster calls The French Lieutenant’s Woman “the first major commercial novel to seriously address changes in the landscape of fictional theory” (76). The novel uses metafiction, in which the narrator breaks the fourth wall (between the narrator and readers) to directly address readers, telling them that the novel cannot be a Victorian novel because it is actually located in the time of Roland Barthes. Moreover, Fowles presents two alternate endings in the novel. The novel’s play with metafiction makes Fowles a widely celebrated author.

One of the most enduring Victorian novelists, Jane Austen (1775-1817) wrote six novels in her brief lifetime, including Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1816). Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously in 1817. Austen is widely regarded as an expert observer and chronicler of her social milieu: landed (landowning) British gentry. Featuring heroines who balance their need for identity with the requirements of living in a conventional world, her novels continue to be popular for their themes of romance, conflict, and female agency.

Foster focuses on Austen’s use of the omniscient narrator, discussing how she infuses a detached, gentle irony into this voice. In addition, he analyzes Austen’s use of witty and insightful first lines to draw readers into her world. Another reason that Austen is important in Foster’s book is her intertextual appeal, since her works continue to inspire books, films, and television series.

Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) is considered one of the originators of the modern novel. His novel Don Quixote (1605) is widely regarded as one of the most influential works of Western literature and has gave rise to words such as “quixotic” (idealistic to the point of being unrealistic) and expressions like “tilting at windmills” (attacking an imaginary enemy). In the novel, Quixote is so enamored with romances featuring knights that he sets out, along with his sidekick Sancho Panza, to seek knighthood, undertaking comical adventures along the way.

Foster discusses how Cervantes achieved a radical triumph with Don Quixote, creating a metafictional novel in the 17th century. The rise of Don Quixote inextricably links to the rise of the novel and the genre’s endless capacity to reinvent itself.