Felix Holt, the Radical

The romance novel is a literary genre developed in Western culture, mainly in English-speaking countries. Novels in this genre place their primary... focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and must have an "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending." Through the late 20th and early 21st centuries, these novels are commercially in two main varieties: category romances, which are shorter books with a one-month shelf-life, and single-title romances, which are generally longer with a longer shelf-life. Separate from their type, a romance novel can exist within one of many subgenres, including contemporary, historical, science fiction and paranormal. One of the earliest romance novels was Samuel Richardson's popular 1740 novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, which was revolutionary on two counts: it focused almost entirely on courtship and did so entirely from the perspective of a female protagonist. In the next century, Jane Austen expanded the genre, and her Pride and Prejudice is often considered the epitome of the genre. Austen inspired Georgette Heyer, who introduced historical romances in 1921.
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Social novels, also known as social problem novels or realist fiction, originated in the 18th century but gained a popular following in the 19th... century with the rise of the Victorian Era and in many ways was a reaction to industrialization, social, political and economic issues and movements. In the 1830s the social novel saw resurgence as emphasis on widespread reforms of government and society emerged, and acted as a literary means of protest and awareness of abuses of government, industry and other repercussions suffered by those who did not profit from England's economic prosperity. The sensationalized accounts and stories of the working class poor were directed toward middle class audiences to help incite sympathy and action towards pushing for legal and moral changes, as with the Reform Act of 1832, and crystallized different issues in periodicals and novels for a growing literate population. Different sub-genres of the social novel included the industrial novel that focused on the country’s working class rural and urban poor and also the later ‘condition of England’ novel that was geared toward education, suffrage and other social movements.
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The industrial novel is a genre of early Victorian literature. A subclass of the social novel, it portrays the difficult conditions of life of the... urban working class during the Industrial Revolution. Many industrial novels featured sympathetic portrayals of Chartists or strikers.
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Mystery fiction is a loosely-defined term. 1.It is often used as a synonym for detective fiction or crime fiction— in other words a novel or... short story in which a detective investigates and solves a crime mystery. Sometimes mystery books are nonfiction. The term "mystery fiction" may sometimes be limited to the subset of detective stories in which the emphasis is on the puzzle/suspense element and its logical solution , as a contrast to hardboiled detective stories, which focus on action and gritty realism. 2.Although normally associated with the crime genre, the term "mystery fiction" may in certain situations refer to a completely different genre, where the focus is on supernatural or thriller mystery . This usage was common in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, where titles such as Dime Mystery, Thrilling Mystery and Spicy Mystery offered what at the time were described as "weird menace" stories – supernatural horror in the vein of Grand Guignol.
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