"The last two decades have been turbulent ones for the study of the novel, and most of the waves have been created by Michael McKeon... The fifteenth anniversary edition... offers the opportunity to reflect on McKeon's extraordinary contribution to studies of the novel... Because the work is so careful and the thinking so precise, I find the story he tells just as compelling now as in the 1980s and, if anything, more satisfying in its comprehension of issues and weaving them into a coherent whole."