An examination of how eighteenth century novels described and defined the feminine and feminine life during the rise of the modern novel. Novels discussed include Moll Flanders, La Vie de Marianne, Pamela, Fanny Hill, Manon Lescaut, Clarissa, La Nouvelle Heloise, and Les Laisons Dangereuses.

Admirers and detractors of Vladimir Nabokov have viewed him as an ingenious contriver of literary games, teasing and even outsmarting his readers through his self-reflexive artifice and the many codes and puzzles he devises in his fiction. Nabokov himself spoke a number of times about reality as a term that always has to be put in scare quotes. Consequently, many critics and readers have thought of him as a writer uninterested in the world outside literature. Robert Alter shows how Nabokov was passionately concerned with the real world and its complexities, from love and loss to exile, freedom, and the impact of contemporary politics on our lives. In these essays, Alter spans the breadth of Nabokov's writings, from his memoir, lectures, and short stories to major novels such as Lolita. He demonstrates how the self-reflexivity of Nabokov's fiction becomes a vehicle for expressing very real concerns. What emerges is a portrait of a brilliant stylist who is at once serious and playful, who cared deeply about human relationships and the burden of loss, and who was acutely sensitive to the ways political ideologies can distort human values.

Harold Fisch explores the biblical influence on the style and the structure of landmark novels by Fielding, Defoe, Gearge Eliot, Kafka, Dostoevsky and others. These turn out, again and again, to be re-readings of biblical stories. This echoing is sometimes explicit as in Joseph Andrews , where Fielding offers us a comic revision of the career of the biblical Joseph. But it can be inexplicit and even unconscious as in Kafka's The Trial , which, without mentioning Job, reads (as Northop Frye has noted) like a midrashic commentary on that book. In a study remarkable for its range and subtlety, the author develops the notion of the novel as midrash but argues that while the great novelists were held in thrall by the biblical patterns and stories, they were also regularly compelled to throw off this thraldom. They could not manage without the Bible but at the same time "it would not do." Fisch discusses the adversial realation to the biblical text with reference to two archetypal narratives: the Job story and the Dinding of Isaac. Of particluar interest are the chapters devoted to the Israeli novelist S.Y. Agnon and A.B. Yehoshua.