Introduction
1. The novel and the nation
2. Cavaliers, Puritans, and rogues : English prose fiction from 1485 to 1700
3. Cross-grained Crusoe : Defoe and the contradictions of Englishness
4. Histories of rebellion : from 1688 to 1793
5. The novel of suffering : Richardson, Fielding, and Goldsmith
6. The benevolent robber : from Fielding to the 1790s
7. Romantic Toryism : Scott, Disraeli, and others
8. Tory daughters and the politics of marriage : Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Elizabeth Gaskell
9. 'Turn again, Dick Whittington!' : Dickens and the fiction of the city
10. At home and abroad in Victorian and Edwardian fiction : from 'Vanity fair' to 'The secret agent'
11. Puritan and provincial Englands : from Emily Brontë to D.H. Lawrence
12. From Forster to Orwell : the novel of England's destiny
13. From Kipling to independence : losing the empire
14. Round tables : chivalry and the twentieth-century English novel sequence
15. Inward migrations : multiculturalism, anglicization, and internal exile
Conclusion. On Englishness and the twenty-first-century novel.