This volume defines a crucial transnational literary "zone" that shaped the development of the modern novel. During the first two centuries of the genre's history, Britain and France were locked in political, economic and military struggle. The period also saw British and French writers, critics and readers enthusiastically exchanging works, codes and theories of the novel. Building on both nationally based literary history and comparatist work on poetics, this book rethinks the genre's evolution as marking the power and limits of modern cultural nationalism. In the Channel zone, the novel developed through interactions among texts, readers, writers and translators that inextricably linked national literary cultures. It served as a forum to promote and critique nationalist cliches, whether from the standpoint of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the insurgent nationalism of colonized spaces or the non-nationalized culture of consumption. In the process, the Channel zone promoted codes that became the genre's hallmarks, including the sentimental poetics that would shape fiction through the 19th century. Uniting leading critics who bridge literary history and theory, this book should ap