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A lively and comprehensive account of the whole tradition of European fiction for students and teachers of comparative literature, this volume covers twenty-five of the most significant and influential novelists in Europe from Cervantes to Kundera. Each essay examines an author's use of, and contributions to, the genre and also engages an important aspect of the form, such as its relation to romance or one of its sub-genres, such as the Bildungsroman. Larger theoretical questions are introduced through specific readings of exemplary novels. Taking a broad historical and geographic view, the essays keep in mind the role the novel itself has played in the development of European national identities and in cultural history over the last four centuries. While conveying essential introductory information for new readers, these authoritative essays reflect up-to-date scholarship and also review, and sometimes challenge, conventional accounts. Table of Contents Introduction: the novel in Europe, 1600–1900 1. Miguel de Cervantes 2. Daniel Defoe 3. Samuel Richardson 4. Henry Fielding 6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 7. Laurence Sterne 8. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 9. Walter Scott 10. Stendhal Ann 11. Mary Shelley 12. Honoré de Balzac 13. Charles Dickens 14. George Eliot 15. Gustave Flaubert 16. Fyodor Dostoevsky 17. Leo Tolstoy Donna 18. Emile Zola 19. Henry James 20. Marcel Proust 21. Thomas Mann 22. James Joyce 23. Virginia Woolf 24. Samuel Beckett 25. Milan Kundera Conclusion: the European novel after 1900 Further reading Index.