The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a 12-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the 'literary' novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and tendencies.

Volume 3, The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820-1800 charts one of the most significant and exciting periods in the history of the genre. Beginning with the decade in which Scott's work helped inaugurate the three-volume novel, and in which many narrative genres, conventions, and preoccupations associated with Victorian fiction first emerged, it traces how these forms developed and changed in the mid nineteenth century, as the novel became established at the centre of British national culture. The volume includes sections on book history, on major authors, and on the varieties of fiction and range of narrative modes during the period. It also features essays on theories of the novel, and on the novel's relationship to other aesthetic forms. Volume 3 also emphasizes the wider cultural role and significance of the novel during the period, including its impact on ideas of place and nation, as well as its intervention in political, scientific, and intellectual contexts.