"...brilliant, richly detailed new introduction to naturalist fiction...It is impossible to give here an adequate idea of this book's rich complexity, subtlety, depth, sophistication, formal beauty. Baguley, master bibliographer as well as critic that he is, has read absolutely everything, or so it would seem...A product of the golden summer of contemporary criticism--full-blown, matured, mellowed, it exemplifies all that is best in it." Philip Walker, Nineteenth-Century French Studies