The Marriage of Minds examines the implications of the common Victorian claim that novel reading can achieve the psychic, ethical, and affective benefits also commonly associated with sympathy in married life. Through close readings of canonical texts in relation to the histories of sympathy, marriage, and reading, The Marriage of Minds begins to fill a long-standing gap between eighteenth-century philosophical notions of sympathy and twentieth-century psychoanalytic concepts of identification. It examines the wide variety of ways in which novels were understood to educate or reform readers in the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, it demonstrates how both the form of the Victorian novel and the experience supposed to result from that form were implicated in ongoing debates about the nature, purpose, and law of marriage.
In this book, Mary Ellen Bellanca offers the first critical study of the nature diary as a genre of empirical knowledge-seeking and aesthetic exploration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A mélange of fact, narrative, and imaginative re-creation, nature diaries played a crucial role in the era’s cultural dialogue of literature and science. Examining the journals of Gilbert White, Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Shore, George Eliot, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, as well as those of lesser-known figures, Daybooks of Discovery shows how journal writing enabled and mediated these writers’ work as naturalists and authors and helped to constitute nineteenth-century discourses of natural history.
Andrea Broomfield, Food and Cooking in Victorian England: A History (Praeger Publishers, 2007)
Nine recipes serve as entry points for detailing the history of food production, cooking, and diet throughout Queen Victoria's reign in England. More than that, however, Broomfield offers an introduction to the world of everyday dining and food preparation during one of the most interesting periods of English history. Food procurement, kitchen duties, and dining conventions were almost always dictated by one's socioeconomic status and one's gender, but questions still remain. Who was most likely to dine out? Who was most likely to be in charge of the family flatware and fine china? Who washed the dishes? Who could afford a fine piece of meat once a week, once a month, or never? All these questions and more are answered in this illuminating history of food and cooking in Victorian England.
Last year a series of conferences in New York, Santa Cruz, and London commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Crystal Palace, the architectural breakthrough at the Great Exhibition of 1851 that symbolized the quintessence of British industrial and technological progress. Gathered here are the best of the papers from those conferences by a number of leading scholars in their fields. Each essay makes an important new contribution to thinking about the place occupied both materially and discursively by the Crystal Palace and other 19th- and 20th-century exhibitions in the struggle to come to meaningful terms with the modern world. With essays from cultural and social historians, literary critics, and art historians, the collection as a whole focuses on how these exhibitions, in attempting to define the cultures of their day, incorporated a range of conflicting ideologies and agendas, in fact compromising their ability to convey a unified message about modernity. The volume also addresses the ways in which the cultural processes and tendencies brought together in these exhibitions have been refracted down to the present, thus informing and complicating our own relationship to modernity and postmodernity.
Alison Chapman and Joanne Meacock, A Rossetti Family Chronology (Palgrave Macmillan, October 2007)
Based on a rich range of primary sources and manuscripts, A Rossetti Family Chronology breaks exciting new ground. Focusing on Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Chronolgy demonstrates the interconnectedness of their friendships and creativity, giving information about literary composition and artistic output, publication and exhibition, reviews, finances, relationships, health and detailing literary and artistic influences. Drawing on many unpublished sources, including family letters and diaries, this new volume in the Author Chronologies series will be of value to all students and scholars of the Rossettis.
This book makes the claim that Victorian novels do not simply reflect professional ideology; they also scrutinize its dilemmas, contradictions, and limitations. In this volume, innovative readings of canonical texts accompany groundbreaking work on less familiar novels and nonfiction to illuminate the Victorians’ own struggles with the emerging professional ideology. The Victorians’ engagement with fundamental ideas of professional identity—such as autonomy, meritocracy, and the service ethic—reveal professionalism’s dual basis in materialist and idealist rationalities, a duality often not recognized by contemporary theorists of historical professionalism.
Dennis Denisoff, ed. The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture (Ashgate, 2008)
This diverse collection addresses the roles assigned to children in the context of nineteenth-century consumer culture. At the same time, it remains steadfast in recognizing that the young did not simply exist within adult-articulated cultural contexts but were agents in their formation. Topics include toys and middle-class childhood; boyhood and toy theater; child performers on the Victorian stage; gender, sexuality and consumerism; imperialism in adventure fiction; the idealization of childhood as a form of adult entertainment and self-flattery; the commercialization of orphans; and the economics behind formulations of child poverty. Together, the essays demonstrate the rising investment both children and adults made in commodities as sources of identity and human worth.
The management of the social body through discourses of health became the principal means of negotiating these new questions of citizenship and the Condition of England. The Citizen’s Body traces the construction of citizenship through the figure of the healthy body, in parliamentary debates on the franchise, in sanitary and housing publications, and in novels. The rhetoric of the healthy body as the ground of civic participation permeated the discourse of the novel, as shown in the work of Dickens, Oliphant, Disraeli, Eliot, and Gaskell.
Forthcoming: Dierdre David & Eileen Gillooly, eds. Contemporary Dickens (Ohio State UP, 2008)
A stimulating collection of essays by a group of distinguished literary scholars, Contemporary Dickens presents some of the most intriguing work being undertaken in Dickens studies today. Through an emphasis on the nineteenth-century origins of our current critical preoccupations and ways of knowing, the essays reveal Dickens to be our contemporary. The contributors argue that such issues as gender and sexuality, environmentalism, and the construction of national identity, were frequently explored and sometimes problematically resolved by Dickens himself. They also illuminate the importance of Dickens's place in our current re-assessment of critical methodologies. Drawing freely upon a variety of reading strategies (materialist, deconstructive, new historical, psychoanalytic, feminist), the essays disclose new aspects of Dickens's engagements with a number of Victorian concerns—moral philosophy, the psychology of the emotions, and life-writing among them—that have once again emerged as significant objects of study in early twenty-first century criticism. Looking at such familiar topics from fresh perspectives, Contemporary Dickens is an original and challenging contribution to Dickens studies and Victorian criticism in general.
Melissa Gregory and Melisa Klimaszewski, Charles Dickens (Brief Lives) (Hesperus, 2008)
Born in Portsmouth in 1812, Dickens rose to fame within his lifetime and, to the present day, has never been out of print. In this highly accessible biography, Dickens scholars Melissa Valiska Gregory and Melisa Klimaszewski examine the fascinating life of this hugely popular literary figure, exploring such classics as Great Expectations and David Copperfield against the backdrop of Victorian England.
In recent years, historical (especially neo-Victorian) fiction, particularly that by women authors, has been at the cutting edge of postmodern reconceptualizations of the past and of contemporary worlds. This collection examines the dynamic experimentation of contemporary women writers from North America, Australia, and the UK. Blurring the dichotomies of the popular and the literary, the fictional and the factual, and covering those narratives that defy categorisation, the essays assembled here offer new approaches to reading contemporary women fiction writers’ reconfigurations of history. Neo-Victorian authors discussed include Angela Carter, Michèle Roberts, Sena Jeter Naslund, and Sarah Waters.
George Moore (1852-1933) was one of the most influential and versatile writers of the turn of the century. His writing always crossed boundaries: generically (between autobiography, fiction and folklore), thematically, psychologically and conceptually. This five-volume reset critical edition addresses current scholarly interest in Moore’s short fiction and novella collections (1: Celibates, 2. Other Short Stories, 3. The Untilled Field, 4. A Story-Teller’s Holiday, 5. In Single Strictness). Each volume contains an extensive introduction, a bibliographic note on the text, editorial notes, textual variants, appendices, and contemporary reviews.
Nancy Henry, The Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot (Cambridge UP, 2008)
Part of the Cambridge Introductions to Literature series, this book provides students, instructors and general readers with the biographical, religious, political, scientific and literary contexts they need to understand the works of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), one of the Victorian Period's most influential authors. Henry devotes a separate section to each novel (as well as to essays and poetry) and surveys a range of critical and theoretical responses to Eliot's work.
In recent years, historians and literary critics have begun to take innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to investigating the complex cultures that developed around and within the nineteenth-century financial system. The essays collected in this volume address topics such as financial journalism, limited liability, life insurance, and the financial plots of Victorian fiction within the contexts of Victorian imperialism, class and gender. Contributors include Timothy Alborn, Ian Baucom, Martin Daunton, Nancy Henry, David Itzkowitz, Audrey Jaffe, Mary Poovey, George Robb, and Cannon Schmitt.
Spanning three decades, E. M. Forster's radio broadcasts for the BBC were a major contribution to British cultural history, reaching in their day a larger audience than his fiction. As a broadcaster Forster was a public intellectual, literary historian and critic, political activist, advocate of India, and wary yet cooperative ally of a colonialist government during World War II. Of particular interest to Victorianists among the seventy annotated broadcasts gathered here are those on Austen, Wordsworth, Arnold, Hardy, and Kipling, and over thirty broadcasts to India—often about contemporary Indian writers—that make available significant new materials for postcolonial analysis.
Based on the exploits of John Sheppard, a thief who was executed in 1724 after a series of prison escapes that made him a folk hero, Jack Sheppard was blamed for inciting working-class crime and vagrancy for decades after its publication. Rendering an eighteenth-century London underworld typified by Newgate Prison and the Bedlam Hospital, Ainsworth’s fast-paced narrative of Sheppard’s struggles against the evil thief-catcher Jonathan Wild was immensely popular, as well as controversial, in its own time, and is now for the first time available in an annotated edition that includes the original George Cruikshank illustrations.
A wide-ranging study of literature, science and the idea of space in the first half of the nineteenth century, as burgeoning mass access to print culture combined with rapid scientific development to create a crisis in managing knowledge. Contemporary writers tried to solve this crisis by rethinking the nature of space. Both literature and science wrestled with the same central political and intellectual concerns—regulating access to knowledge, organising knowledge in productive ways, and formulating the relationships of old and new knowledges. This book provides a rich new picture of the early nineteenth century’s understanding of its own culture.
Few writers have captured the essence of 19th-century London the way Charles Dickens has. A master of extreme situations, Dickens is known for his colorful and often seedy characters and the elaborate settings of his works. This volume from the new Bloom's Classic Critical Views series features a remarkable collection of critical essays from the 19th and early 20th centuries that paint a clear historical portrait of this legendary writer.
Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford UP, 2007)
Empathy and the Novel presents a comprehensive account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Though readers' and authors' empathy contribute to the emotional resonance of fiction and its success in the marketplace, Keen finds the case for altruistic consequences of novel-reading inconclusive. Keen offers a series of hypotheses about literary empathy, including narrative techniques inviting empathetic response. Drawing on narrative theory, literary history, philosophy, and contemporary scholarship in psychology, Keen brings together resources and questions for the literary study of empathy. VICTORIA-L members feature in the chapter on readers' empathy, offering testimony about their empathetic reading experiences.
Forthcoming in paperback: Amy M. King, Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (Oxford UP, 2003, paperback August 2007)
Bringing together novelistic courtships and the botanical systems of Linnaeus and his followers, King offers a striking account of the way in which the language of "bloom" enabled a licit, yet sexualized, representation of maturation and marriage for novelists from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. The girl in bloom—the girl at her social and sexual peak—is a subject plotted through the language of botany. Through a fusion of literary and scientific history, King re-evokes a world of the botanical vernacular: the world in which the “marriages of plants” and the marriages of humans helped explain each other. Bloom's readings offer us an understanding of all that botanical culture could express through those evanescent flowerings.
Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Duke UP, 2007)
With this richly illustrated history of industrial design reform in nineteenth-century Britain, Lara Kriegel demonstrates that preoccupations with trade, labor, and manufacture lay at the heart of Victorian-era debates about cultural institutions. Through aesthetic reform, Victorians sought to redress the inferiority of British crafts in comparison to those made on the continent and in the colonies. Declaring a crisis of design and workmanship among the British laboring classes, reformers pioneered schools of design, copyright protections, and spectacular displays of industrial and imperial wares, most notably the Great Exhibition of 1851. Their efforts culminated with the establishment of the South Kensington Museum, predecessor to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which stands today as home to the world’s foremost collection of the decorative and applied arts. Kriegel’s identification of the significant links between markets and museums, and between economics and aesthetics, amounts to a rethinking of Victorian cultural formation.
Mark Samuels Lasner, The Bookplates of Aubrey Beardsley (Rivendale, 2008)
Highly decorative in contrasting black and white, small in scale, and executed with an eye towards reproduction, the celebrated drawings of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98) are ideally suited for use as bookplates. This informative book describes and illustrates for the first time forty plates made from his works. These include the three bookplates the artist actually designed for the purpose—for the physician and scholar John Lumsden Propert, for his patron Herbert Charles Pollitt, and for the poet Olive Custance, who married Oscar Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Bookplates adapted from Beardsley illustrations have been made for a surprising variety of people, not only collectors, but also a Texas professor, a prolific London journalist, an eminent lawyer, the mother of a famous British publisher, the President of the Royal Academy, a Hungarian composer, and the author and occultist Aleister Crowley.
This is the first book-length study of Tennyson's record of publication in Victorian periodicals. Despite Tennyson's supposed hostility to periodicals, Ledbetter shows that he made a career-long habit of contributing to them and in the process revealed not only his willingness to promote his career but also his status as a highly valued commodity. Ledbetter explores the ironies and tensions created by Tennyson's attitudes toward publishing in Victorian periodicals and the undeniable benefits to his career. Her book enriches not only our understanding of Tennyson's relationship to periodical culture but the textual implications of a poem's relationship with other texts on a periodical page and the meanings available to specific groups of readers targeted by individual periodicals.
This book brings to life the growth of the socialist movement among men and women artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Britain. For these campaigners, socialism was inseparable from desire for a new beauty of life; beauty that also, for many, required a rejection of the sexual conventions of the Victorian era. Livesey uncovers the lasting influence of socialist writers of the 1880s on the emergence of British literary modernism and by tracing the lives and works of neglected writers and activists such as Clementina Black and Dollie Radford, as well Morris, Carpenter and Shaw, she provides a vivid evocation of an era in which revolution seemed imminent and the arts a vital route to that future.
Despite Martineau's controversial dictum that her correspondents destroy her letters, approximately 2,000 letters survive to offer revealing perspectives on her life and work. Featuring correspondents from America, Great Britain, and Europe, Martineau's Collected Letters reads like a Who's Who of 19th-century western culture. While the Autobiography was the officially sanctioned account, it fails to cover the last 21 years of her life, a period covered by the Letters. Most of the letters offered in this set have not been published previously. The fully annotated edition offers an introduction, an extensive biographical directory, and a comprehensive index.
Deborah Logan
Forthcoming: Nancy Fix Anderson, Walter L Arnstein, Deborah Logan, Susie L Steinbach, volume eds. Lives of Victorian Political Figures, Part III: Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, Annie Besant and Millicent Garrett Fawcett by their Contemporaries. Series Editors: Nancy LoPatin-Lummis and Michael Partridge (Pickering & Chatto, October 2008)
This series reproduces in facsimile carefully selected extracts from rare biographies, memoirs, articles, pamphlets, letters, private diaries and other ephemera. Contemporaries often took more partisan views than later historians, as they wrote with no knowledge of their subjects' later careers. The use of these documents permits a new biographical approach.
Peter Melville Logan
Forthcoming: Peter Melville Logan, Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (Albany: State U of New York P, 2009)
Victorian intellectual work on the concept of culture engaged in a constant dialogue with beliefs about non-culture. This study argues that Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Edward Tylor all shared a common preoccupation with the condition of primitive life as exemplifying this state and used it as a springboard to launch their own claims about the value and specific nature of culture. The essence of this imaginary condition was a psychological form of global self-projection called "primitive fetishism," a concept whose currency peaked following the publication of Auguste Comte's Positive Philosophy. Ultimately, the study argues that the modern culture concept needs to be understood as in part a product of the prehistory of fetishism. Recovering the role of the primitive in foundational writing on culture thus contributes to the ongoing discussion of categorical problems in the uses of culture as an analytical tool.
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss. Oliver Lovesey, ed. (Broadview, 2007)
This classic Victorian novel tells the story of Maggie Tulliver, whose passionate ambition conflicts with provincial society's narrow view of women. George Eliot's most autobiographical novel, The Mill on the Floss remains one of her most popular and influential works. This edition includes a critical introduction and extensive contextualizing notes as well as a broad range of appendices drawn from contemporary documents dealing with issues such as nineteenth-century views of disability, education, and the Woman Question.
Examining works by Christina Rossetti, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Michael Field, as well as the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women, Krista Lysack in this important new work challenges the dominant construction of Victorian femininity as characterized by self-renunciation and the regulation of appetite. Come Buy, Come Buy provides a reappraisal of the female shopper in women's writing of Victorian England and demonstrates how women's shopping practices are materialized as forms of narrative, poetic, and cultural inscription. Lysack considers a variety of archival sources (shopping guides, women's fashion magazines, household management guides, newspapers, and advertisements) and cultural practices (department store shopping, shoplifting and kleptomania, domestic economy, and suffragette shopkeeping), tracing a genealogy of the woman shopper from dissident domestic spender to aesthetic connoisseur, from curious shop-gazer to political radical.
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, 2nd edition, Sarah Maier, ed. (Broadview, 2007)
This classic novel tells the story of how a poor rural couple becomes convinced that they are descended from the ancient family of d’Urbervilles. This is a revised, updated, and expanded Broadview edition that highlights a feminist interpretation of the novel in an extensive introduction. The range of historical appendices (including contemporary articles, letters, maps, news stories, and reviews) will greatly enhance a reader’s understanding of the text.
Sara Malton
Forthcoming: Sara Malton, Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Palgrave, March 2009).
In Forgery in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture, Sara Malton insists that we more fully account for the prominence of forgery—as a financial crime of some severity—in the nineteenth-century cultural imagination. In doing so, she examines social and legal history and a range of nineteenth-century works from Dickens to Wilde as she considers the shifting representation of the crime and its perpetrator across the century. Distinct in its historical attentiveness, Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture illuminates the breadth of cultural issues to which this "crime of the first magnitude" is linked.
The Mighty Scot turns a spotlight on the Victorian love affair with Scotland. Examining influential representations of Scottishness in nineteenth-century novels, paintings, deer-stalking memoirs, poetry, historical documents, cartoons, and more, it investigates the discovery of Scotland as an imagined wellspring of fierce primal masculinity. How and why did the mystique of Scottish masculinity arise? What role did it play in English national identity? And how did it impact Scots' own sense of national identity and masculinity? Exploring these questions, The Mighty Scot shows the intricate interconnections between masculinity and nation, and contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex ideological function of Scotland within Britain.
Jill L. Matus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (Cambridge UP, Feb. 2007)
In the last few decades, Elizabeth Gaskell has become a figure of growing importance in the field of Victorian literary studies. Critics are increasingly coming to acknowledge that her work is neither artless nor transparent. They are also granting growing recognition to her intellectuality, her familiarity with matters of scientific, economic, and theological enquiry, and her narrative sophistication. This Companion features chapters on individual novels as well as more general topics (Gaskell, gender and the family; Gaskell and social transformation; Gaskell and the Unitarian context). Edited by Jill Matus, with contributions from well-known scholars such as Patsy Stoneman, John Chapple, Linda K. Hughes, Audrey Jaffe, Susan Hamilton, Nancy Henry, Linda H. Peterson, Nancy S.Weyant, Marion Shaw, and Deirdre d’Albertis.
Why were the English so fascinated by representations of Italians—whether bestial organ-grinders, sensual peasants, glamorous opera singers, or charismatic revolutionaries? Annemarie McAllister explores the wide range of uses made of this emergent country in Victorian written and visual texts, and this is the source of the title metaphor: as John Bull played his Italian Snakes and Ladders, his self-esteem waxed and waned. This study examines how and why Italy operated as an important mechanism in the construction of 'Englishness' via examination of a rich array of primary sources including over fifty illustrations.
This is a cultural history of the greatest cause-célèbre of the Victorian age. The Tichborne Claimant was a butcher who declared in 1866 that he was Sir Roger Tichborne, an aristocrat thought to have been lost at sea many years before. He generated two of the longest trials in English legal history (1871-74) and was sent to prison as an impostor. However, the agitation on his behalf became one of the largest popular movements between the end of Chartism and the rise of Socialism. This study is a 'microhistory,' employing the Tichborne case to examine popular culture, material culture and Victorian mentalities more generally.
Kelly Boyd and Rohan McWilliam (eds.), The Victorian Studies Reader (Routledge, 2007)
The Victorian Studies Reader brings together for the first time the best of international writings about the period since 1980 in a convenient and comprehensible form. New ideas about gender, race, language, politics, space and material culture have transformed the way the Victorians are being discussed today. Each reading is prefaced by a helpful commentary placing the work in context. In their wide-ranging introduction, editors Kelly Boyd and Rohan McWilliam not only illuminate how the Victorians have been imagined since the death of Victoria, but also establish a challenging inter-disciplinary agenda for Victorian Studies in the twenty-first century.
This study examines Victorian fiction as part of an emerging era of new media technologies and information exchange, from the postage stamp and electric telegraph to wireless. Placing fiction (by Dickens, Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Trollope, Henry James, Kipling, and others) in dialogue with media history, it argues that Victorian realism was print culture's sophisticated response to the possibilities and dilemmas of a world of media innovations and information flows.
In some moods, or for some people, the desire to improve can seem so natural as to be banal. The impulse drives forward so much in our culture that it can color our thoughts without being much noticed. But in other moods, or for other people, this strenuous desire becomes all too noticeable, and its demands crushing. It can then drive a sleepless attention to ourselves, a desolate evaluation of what we have been and what we are. Evoking and analyzing this desire, The Burdens of Perfection reads essayists, poets and especially novelists, while providing an extensive response to the moral perfectionism of Stanley Cavell. In the process, Andrew H. Miller offers a fresh way to perceive the Victorians and the lingering traces their quests for improvement have left on readers.
Framed examines literature and film of the fin de siècle era—roughly 1880 to 1914—to uncover the unique social role of the glamorous female criminal in popular British crime narrative. Drawing upon magazine culture, early cinema, and literary crime genres, Framed considers the figure of the "New Woman Criminal" in light of suffrage-era feminism, consumerism, a newly visual media sphere, and radical political movements of the dynamite era. The New Woman Criminal embodies ambivalent cultural fantasies about modern feminine identity: she appeals to desire for feminine power and liberation, but promotes consumption and image as means to this end.
The Victorian period witnessed the beginning of a debate on the status of animals that continues today. This volume explicitly acknowledges the way twenty-first-century deliberations about animal rights and the fact of past and prospective animal extinction haunt the discussion of the Victorians' obsession with animals. Combining close attention to historical detail with a sophisticated analytical framework, the contributors examine the various forms of human dominion over animals, including imaginative possession of animals in the realms of fiction, performance, and the visual arts, as well as physical control as manifest in hunting, killing, vivisection and zookeeping. The diverse range of topics, analyzed from a contemporary perspective, makes the volume a significant contribution to Victorian studies. Harriet Ritvo's conclusion points toward future studies of animals in the Victorian period.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights. Beth Newman, ed. (Broadview, 2007)
Over a hundred and fifty years after its initial publication, Emily Brontë’s turbulent portrayal of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, two northern English households nearly destroyed by violent passions in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, continues to provoke and fascinate readers. The introduction and appendices to this Broadview edition explore the impact of industrialization on the people of Yorkshire, consider the novel’s representation of gender, and survey the ways contemporary scholarship has sought to account for Heathcliff.
Daniel Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge UP, 2008)
This radically new account of the relationship between photography and literary realism in Victorian Britain draws on detailed readings of photographs, writings about photography, and fiction by Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Oscar Wilde. While other critics have argued that photography defined what would be 'real' for literary fiction, Daniel A. Novak demonstrates that photography itself was associated with the unreal—with fiction and the literary imagination. Once we acknowledge that manipulation was essential rather than incidental to the project of nineteenth-century realism, our understanding of the relationship between photography and fiction changes in important ways.
Ellen O'Brien, Crime in Verse: The Poetics of Murder in the Victorian Era (Ohio State UP, 2008)
Crime in Verse considers the cultural engagements of poetry while historicizing murder's entanglement in legal fictions, punitive practices, medical theories, class conflicts, and gender codes. Individual chapters examine the classed politics of crime and punishment in the broadside ballad, the epistemological tensions of homicidal lunacy and criminal responsibility in the dramatic monologue, and the legal and ideological frictions of domestic violence in the verse novel and verse drama. Developing focused analyses of generic and discursive meanings, the study traces a poetics of murder that aligned problems of legal and literary interpretation in provocative, disruptive, and innovative ways.
This interdisciplinary collection of essays, the first such collection published on Samuel Butler, provides a critical overview of his career and places his multifaceted body of work within the cultural framework of the Victorian age. Essays by Roger Robinson, Gillian Beer, Elinor Shafer, Bernard Lightman, Sally Shuttleworth, Mary Beard, Herb Sussman, David Amigoni, Elizabeth Edwards, and others, trace Butler's emergence as one of the great ironists of the mid- and late Victorian era. Author of two evolution-saturated satires, Erewhon (1872) and The Way of All Flesh (1903), as well as four works on evolution, Butler was one of the prolific evolutionary speculators of his time. His admirers included Ford Madox Ford, George Bernard Shaw, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster.
Situating Tennyson among a wide range of Victorian poets, politicians, theologians, and theorists, Tennyson's Rapture explores this poet's representation of rapture as a radical mechanism of transformation—social, political, and personal—and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics. Tennyson's fascination with transformation is figured formally in the genre of the dramatic monologue, and this book offers a new approach to reading all Victorian dramatic monologues, arguing against a critical tradition that sees speakers as unintentionally self-revealing and ignorant of the implications of their speech. Tennyson's Rapture probes the complex aims of these discursive performances, and explores the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson's influential career.
This edition of the Autobiography reproduces the original 1877 text, which Martineau composed in 1855 and had printed in anticipation of her death. It includes illustrations of the author and her homes; excerpts from the "Memorials," added by her editor Maria Chapman; and reviews that praise and critique Martineau's method as an autobiographer and achievement as a Victorian woman of letters.
Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire: British Radicals and the Imperial Challenge (I.B. Tauris, 2007)
This classic text is about the critique of British imperialism that arose at the time of the Anglo-Boer War, including those by JA Hobson and others. Originally published at the time of the Vietnam War, its reissue coincides with the Iraq War, and is accompanied by a lengthy new Introduction exploring its relevance to our modern situation, and bringing it up to date.
Patricia Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee's Supernatural Tales (Ashgate, 2008)
Vernon Lee's definition of the supernatural in the preface to Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (1890) questions the nature of the 'genuine ghost', and argues that this figure is to be found in our own psyches where it functions as a mediator between past and present. Using D. W. Winnicott's 'transitional object' theory, which maintains that adults transfer their childhood engagement with toys to art and cultural artifacts, Patricia Pulham argues that the art objects that often function as 'ghosts' in Lee's supernatural fiction held complex meanings that allowed her to explore alternative identities and permitted the expression of transgressive sexualities.
This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1854 Fifth Edition, the last edition corrected by the author. In addition to a critical Preface, explanatory notes, Chronology, and comprehensive Bibliography, the edition includes a rich Contexts section that includes ten contemporary reviews, letters to and by Gaskell in relation to the writing and reception of Mary Barton, documentary material from Engels and Faucher, Gaskell's short story "Libbie Marsh's Three Eras" from her three short story set called "Life in Manchester," Dion Boucicault's 1863 dramatic adaptation called "The Long Strike," and fifteen illustrations from editions published from 1880 through 1907 that serve as a mini visual history of late Victorian book illustration styles. The Criticism section includes pieces by Kathleen Tillotson, Raymond Williams, Richard D. Altick, Graham Handley, John Lucas, Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Catherine Gallagher, Patsy Stoneman, Hilary M. Schor, Deborah Epstein Nord, Josephine M. Guy, Dierdre d'Albertis, Susan Zlotnick, Jonathan H. Grossman, Amy Mae King, and Liam Corely.
Kimberly Rhodes's interdisciplinary book is the first to explore fully the complicated representational history of Shakespeare's Ophelia during the Victorian period. In nineteenth-century Britain, the shape, function and representation of women's bodies were typically regulated and interpreted by public and private institutions, while emblematic fictional female figures like Ophelia functioned as idealized templates of Victorian womanhood. Rhodes examines the widely disseminated representations of Ophelia, from works by visual artists and writers, to interpretations of her character in contemporary productions of Hamlet, revealing her as a nexus of the struggle for the female body's subjugation.
Includes the full text of Stead's influential report, originally serialized in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885 and never before reprinted in its entirety. Annotations clarify many of Stead's references. A lengthy introductory essay places the report, and the legislation it was designed to support, in the context of a sixty-year battle to control organized prostitution through the substance and application of the law.
Antony Simpson, ed.
Forthcoming: Antony Simpson, ed., Witnesses to the Scaffold; English Literary Figures as Observers of Public Executions: Pierce Egan, Thackeray, Dickens, Alexander Smith, G.A. Sala, Orwell. (Lambertville, NJ: The True Bill P, 2008)
Essays by five literary figures who witnessed public executions in Britain are presented in the context of the debate over this spectacle, which continued through the 19th century until its abolition in 1868. The essays also present a setting for related developments, including the reform of the penal law and the law of criminal procedure and, most of all, the movement for the total abolition of capital punishment, which acquired considerable strength mid-century. An additional essay by Orwell, who witnessed an execution in Burma in the 1920s, provides an additional perspective on the nature and effects of this form of punishment.
Philip E. Smith, II, ed. 
Forthcoming: Philip E. Smith II, ed., Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde (Modern Language Association, December 2008)
Wilde wrote at a pivotal moment between the Victorian period and modernism, and his work is sometimes considered prescient of the postmodern age. He is now taught in a variety of university courses: in literature, theater, criticism, Irish studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and gay studies. This volume suggests editions, resources, and criticism, both in print and online, that may be useful for the teacher. It also contains twenty-five essays that discuss Wilde's stories, fairy tales, poetry, plays, essays, letters, and life—from the perspective of a wide range of disciplines.
Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson, eds., Michael Field and Their World (Rivendale P, 2007)
Writing as “Michael Field,” Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), the British aunt and niece lesbian couple, produced an enormous and distinguished body of plays and poetry. Long neglected, they now appear frequently in anthologies of Victorian literature, queer literature, and literature by women. This is the first collection of essays to be devoted to their lives, works, relations with contemporaries, and influential legacies, as well as to the critical and theoretical questions raised by their collaboration. The contributors to this volume are some of today’s most prominent scholars of Victorian studies and gender studies from several continents.
This lavishly-illustrated volume offers a new interpretation of the significance of the portrait image during the final decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, using materials drawn from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware. This study highlights the connections between the images of writers' and artists' faces that circulated through the British periodical press, through exhibition spaces in London, and through book publishing, and such late-Victorian cultural obsessions as defining "genius," masculinity, femininity, and class status. It examines, too, the relationship between the circulation of portraits and notions of modernity created through advertising, public relations, and commodification.
Anne Stiles, ed., Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920 (Palgrave, November 2007)
The essays in this collection demonstrate how late-Victorian and Edwardian neurology and fiction shared common philosophical concerns and rhetorical strategies. Between 1860 and 1920, neurologists like Silas Weir Mitchell and Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote moving literature, while novelists like H.G. Wells and Wilkie Collins used fiction to dramatize neurological discoveries and their consequences. These six decades witnessed unprecedented interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and artists, who found common ground in their shared ambivalence towards the prevailing intellectual climate of biological determinism.
Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910 (Oxford UP, 2008)
This book is the first to provide a connected history of epic poetry in Britain between the French Revolution and the First World War. Although epic is widely held to have been shouldered aside by the novel, if not invalidated in advance by modernity, in fact the genre was practiced without interruption across the long nineteenth century by nearly every prominent Romantic and Victorian poet, and shoals of ambitious poetasters into the bargain. Poets kept the epic alive by revising its conventions to meet an overlapping series of changing realities: insurgent democracy, Napoleonic war, the rise of class consciousness and repeated reform of the franchise, challenges posed by scientific advance to religious belief and cherished notions of the human, the evolution of a postnationalist and eventually imperialist identity for Britain as the world's superpower. Each of these developments called on nineteenth-century epic to do what the genre had always done: affirm the unity of its sponsoring culture through a large utterance that both acknowledged the distinctive flowering of the modern and affirmed its rootedness in tradition. The best writers answered this call by figuring Britain's self-renewal and the genre's as versions of one another. In passing Herbert Tucker notices scores of mediocre congeners (and worse), so as to show where the challenge of a given decade fell and suggest what lay at stake. The background these lesser works provide throws into relief what the book stresses in extended discussions of several dozen major works: an unbroken history of daring experimentation in which circumspect, inventive, worried epoists engaged because the genre and the age alike demanded it.
This is the first book examining Ruskin's writing on theater of all kinds, which he used throughout his life to illustrate points about social justice, aesthetics, ontology, and epistemology. Performing the Victorian also interprets recent plays portraying Ruskin as prude or pedophile (The Invention of Love, The Countess, Modern Painters), comparing them to concurrent plays about Oscar Wilde (Gross Indecency, The Judas Kiss). Like Ruskin, Wilde is misrepresented on the fin-de-millennial stage anachronistically, as icon of homosexual identity. These static identity labels constrain contemporary audiences more rigidly than the mercurial selves conjured in the prose of either Ruskin or Wilde.
This volume examines nineteenth-century visual culture as European culture redefined itself, embracing political and social change yet expressing tensions and anxieties about modernity. Scholars of history, art, the history of science, architecture, and literature explore the anxiety-producing effects of rapid and constant change, and how the visual functioned as the means of expressing and allaying that anxiety through constant efforts to process and integrate the centrifugal experience of industrial capitalism. Through multidisciplinary case studies, we see how visual culture developed into forms distinguished by hybridity, the reinvention and transformation of genres, and the creative crossing of traditional boundaries.
Julia M. Wright, ed., Irish Literature, 1750-1900: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2008)
This anthology includes nearly forty authors and, with very few exceptions, full-text editions of plays, poems, and short fiction. Non-fiction prose also appears in either substantial excerpts or full texts. Among the Victorian-era authors represented in the anthology are William Carleton, the Banim brothers, James Clarence Mangan, Samuel Ferguson, J. Sheridan LeFanu, Jane Wilde, Dion Boucicault, William Allingham, Julia Kavanagh, Oscar Wilde, and Dora Sigerson. Editorial apparatus includes an introduction, suggestions for further reading, and a chronology of historical events and major Irish novels.
This study focuses on the way nineteenth-century Irish writers wrote about India, showing how their own experience of colonial subjection and unfulfilled national aspirations informed their work. Their writings express sympathy with the colonised or oppressed people of India in order to unsettle nineteenth-century imperialist stereotypes, and demonstrate their own opposition to the idea and reality of empire. Drawing on Enlightenment philosophy, studies of nationalism, and postcolonial theory, this study examines fiction by Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, gothic tales by Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, poetry by Thomas Moore and others, as well as a wide array of non-fiction prose.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton UP, 2008)
Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attention to ordinary life. But two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday—pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed. Why were writers in Britain and France drawn to this art of the past? What does this tell us about the nature of realism? In this beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book, Ruth Yeazell explores the nineteenth century’s fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its doubts about an art that had long challenged traditional values.
The addict's life narrative is all too familiar—the fall from grace, compulsion and despair, recovery and hope—but what about the cultural history of this story? Inventing the Addict shows how addiction became an available identity when a modernizing medical establishment and burgeoning culture of consumption updated the temperance icon of the sinful drunkard. Susan Zieger traces nineteenth-century metaphors of addiction such as exile, self-enslavement, and disease through texts such as De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.