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Harry Shaw's aim is to promote a fuller understanding of nineteenth-century historical fiction by revealing its formal possibilities and limitations. His wide-ranging book establishes a typology of the ways in which history was used in prose fiction during the nineteenth century, examining major works by Sir Walter Scott--the first modern historical novelist--and by Balzac, Hugo, Anatole France, Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens, and Tolstoy.