Includes index.

This book aims to trace the course of English fiction from earliest times to modern times and its continental sources. Wilbur Cross skilfully simplifies the process of change, of challenge and response, of interaction between the individual writer and his epoch and of the present with the past epochs. He adopts a scientific approach to the study of history of modern fiction in English. He applies the scientific principles of modification, variation, deviation, persistence and transformation for assessing and appraising individual works of fiction, their authors and the times in which they were written. Scholarly yet simple, this book defies ageing. University teachers, students and research scholars just cannot afford to miss it.