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James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family is the first monograph focusing on Sweeney Todd and Varney the Vampyre's creator James Malcolm Rymer (1814–1884). It argues that Rymer wrote his so-called ‘penny bloods'and ‘dreadfuls'for and about British urban working families. In the 1840s, the notion of the family acquired unprecedented prominence and radical potential. Raised in an artisanal artistic-literary family, Rymer wrote for and edited family magazines early in that genre's history, deployed Chartist domesticity to liberal ends, and collaborated with cheap publisher Edward Lloyd to define and popularise the domestic romance genre. In 1850s–1860s penny serials published by George W.M. Reynolds, John Dicks, and Lloyd, Rymer showed how families might sustain Empire and advocated for patriarchal family dynamics in response to literary and political change. During the fin-de-siècle, Rymer's penny fiction was demonised as hyper-masculine ‘bloods'and ‘dreadfuls', a reputation it retains today. Reading Victorian penny fiction's most indicative author's works as a corpus and with attention to their original textual, cultural, and political contexts reveals it as the family-oriented phenomenon it in fact was.

Reading the Victorian Novel is a clear and engaging introduction to Victorian fiction.In this book, Annette Federico invites readers to turn their attention to the bursting imaginations and formal inventiveness of Victorian novelists themselves. Five conventions prevailed in the building of a Victorian novel: serialisation, narration, plotting, description, and characterization. Each chapter is rich in examples of these practices and attentive to the historical and cultural contexts that shaped them, as well as to the responses and judgments of Victorian readers and contemporary scholars. Federico keeps the focus on the writer's choices and the reader's experience––on the meeting of minds and imaginations against the backdrop of history.Reading the Victorian Novel is an appreciative and discerning guide for anyone with an interest in the resonant and vibrant worlds of nineteenth-century fiction.

Drawing on the recent academic interest in approaching health and wellbeing from a humanities perspective, Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds investigates how the Victorians dealt with questions of mental health by examining literary works in the genre of sensation fiction. The novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, two prominent writers of the genre, often portray characters suffering from mental illnesses commonly diagnosed at the time, among which are monomania, moral insanity, melancholia, and hypochondria. By studying the fictional works of Braddon and Collins alongside medical texts from the nineteenth century, it sets out to investigate how these novels fictionally represented real mental sufferings. This book considers the different mental illnesses the characters of sensation novels develop inside and outside the home as they struggle to define their own identity against Victorian social expectations. It demonstrates how these novels fictionalised the crisis of the leisured upper classes, who spent most of their time at home, and found themselves at odds with a society that increasingly separated the domestic and working environments, while also considering the impact that a lack of a sense of domestic belonging could have on their mental health. Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds further analyses the extent to which domesticity—in its excess or lack—could afflict the mental health of Victorian men and women through the fictional representation of suicidal thoughts and acts in the novels of Braddon and Collins.

Inheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Finance, Family, and the Law investigates how Victorian fiction reconfigures the narrative and social conventions of inheritance. While recent criticism has concentrated on this fiction's engagement with newer financial forms, this book contends that Victorian novels both attest to the persistence of inheritance and reveal its unsettling affinities with speculative forms. Focusing on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Wilkie Collins's Armadale¬ (1866), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72), each chapter explores a recurring pattern of contrast and conflation between inheritance and financial speculation. Taking an interdisciplinary historical and formal approach, Reich shows how this pattern gives narrative shape to concerns that were also emerging in contemporary political and legal debates around succession, bequest, landed estates, and conceptions of the family. Attending to the novels'concrete and figurative allusions to these forms as well as their tentative alternatives, Reich also illustrates how the novels'self-reflexive subversion of both characters and readers'expectations based on inheritance conventions challenge our modes of reading. Inheritance and Speculation thus not only illuminates the integral role played by inheritance in Victorian fiction's mediation of the credit economy, but also offers a new understanding of the complex role of convention in this fiction.

A revelatory history of the women who brought Victorian criminals to account—and how they became a cultural sensation From Wilkie Collins to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the traditional image of the Victorian detective is male. Few people realise that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves. Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women's lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine who got the better of love rats, burglars, and murderers alike. How did the morally ambiguous work of real women detectives, sometimes paid to betray their fellow women, compare with the exploits of their fictional counterparts, who always save the day? Lodge's book takes us into the murky underworld of Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the female detective as both an unacknowledged labourer and a feminist icon.

The Victorian novel developed unique forms of reasoning under uncertainty-of thinking, judging, and acting in the face of partial knowledge and unclear outcome. George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, and later Joseph Conrad drew on science, mathematics, philosophy, and the law to articulate a phenomenology of uncertainty against emergent models of prediction and decision-making. In imaginative explorations of unsure reasoning, hesitant judgment, and makeshift action, these novelists cultivated distinctive responses to uncertainty as intellectual concern and cultural disposition, participating in the knowledge work of an era shaped by numerical approaches to the future. Reading for uncertainty yields a rich account of the dynamics of thinking and acting, a fresh understanding of realism as a genre of the probable, and a vision of literary-critical judgment as provisional and open-ended. Daniel Williams spotlights the value of literary art in a present marked by models and technologies of prediction.

This innovative new book combines environmental justice scholarship with a material ecocriticism to explore the way in which early Victorian literature (1837–1860) responded to the growing problem of environmental injustice. As this book emphasises, environmental injustice – simply, the convergence of poverty and pollution – was not an isolated phenomenon, but a structural form of inequality; a product of industrial modernity's radical reformation of British society, it particularly affected the working classes. As each chapter reveals in detail, this form of environmental inequality (or ‘classism') drew sharply critical reactions from figures as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Engels, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin, and from within the Chartist movement, as working-class writers themselves reacted to the hazardous realities of a divided society. But as this book also reveals, these writers recognised that a truly just society respects the needs of the nonhuman and takes account of the material world in all its own aliveness; even if only tentatively, they reached for a more inclusive, emergent form of justice that might address the social and ecological impacts of industrial modernity, an idea which is no less relevant today.This book represents an indispensable resource for scholars and students working in the fields of Victorian literature, environmental justice, and ecocriticism.

English Industrial Fiction of the Mid-Nineteenth Century discusses the valuable fiction written in mid-nineteenth-century Britain which represents the situations of the new breed of industrial workers, both the mostly male factory workers who operated in the oppressive mills of the midlands and north and, in other stories, the oppressed seamstresses who worked mostly in London in very poor and low-paid conditions. Beginning with a general introduction to workers'fiction at the start of the period, this volume charts the rise of an identifiable genre of industrial fiction and the development of a substantial mode of seamstress fiction through the 1840s, including an analysis of novels by Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, and more briefly Charlotte Bronte, Geraldine Jewsbury and George Eliot. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of industrial fiction and nineteenth-century Britain, or those with an interest in the relationship between literature, society and politics.

Tracing the origins of how we think about strangers to the Victorian period, Strangers and the Enchantment of Space in Victorian Fiction, 1830– 1865 explores the vital role strangers had in shaping social relations during the cultural transformations of the Industrial Revolution, transportation technologies, and globalization. While studies of nineteenth- century Britain tend to trace the rise of an aloof cosmopolitanism and distancing narrative strategies, this volume calls attention to the personalizing impulse in nineteenth- century literary form, investigating the deeply personal reflections on individual and national identities. In her book, Dr. Pond leads the reader through homes of the urban poor, wandering the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, loitering in suburban neighborhoods, riding the railway, and touring a country estate. Readers will experience how the ordinary can be enchanting, and how the mundane can be unexpected, discovering a new way of thinking about strangers and their influence on our lives. Through an examination of the short and long fictional forms of Martineau, Dickens, Brontë, Gaskell, and Braddon, this study locates the figure of the stranger as a powerful topos in the story of Victorian literature and the ethics of social relations. This book will be ideal for those seeking to understand the dynamics of the stranger in Victorian fiction as a figure for understanding the changing dynamics of social relations in England in the early nineteenth century.

This book studies British literary writers'engagement with adaptations of their work across literary, theatrical, and film media in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It considers their critical, reflective, and autobiographical writings about the process of adaptation, and traces how their work was shaped, as well as delimited, by their involvement with adaptations to different media and intermedial writing. Linking canonical and non-canonical writers both chronologically and contemporaneously, and bridging studies of prose fiction adaptation from nineteenth-century theatre to early twentieth-century film, this book offers an interdisciplinary, transhistorical, cultural, and analytical study of adaptation and the variable positions of writers within and across media.

Patriarchy's Creative Resilience explores the disturbing sustainability of White male supremacy. Kramp traces an imaginative failure and an imaginative success; his focus on British speculative fiction published between 1870 and 1900 demonstrates how even this elastic and wildly inventive literary form remains incapable of promoting non- patriarchal masculinity, and he attributes this inability to the creative resiliency of white male supremacy. He demonstrates the inventive use of diverse resources that we frequently view as custom or uncomplicated history and a versatility that we often dismiss as sheer power. He draws on an archive of late nineteenth- century speculative fiction to detail a versatile patriarchal toolbox, including hegemonic masculinity, control of dangerous women, hyperbolic and sentimental performances of male sovereignty, and reversions to authoritarian, at times violent conduct. He also considers how the classic military strategy of dividing to conquer undergirds all these tactics, inhibiting our creating energies and dynamic collaborations. Various chapters demonstrate the enterprise, ingenuity, and adaptability of patriarchy to refashion and rejustify normalized systems of oppression. While scholars have consistently identified moments and agents of resistance to patriarchal structures by highlighting creativity, resiliency, and resourcefulness, Kramp's project reveals how patriarchy itself is creative, resilient, and resourceful.

Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel: Senses and Sensations establishes a new analytical method in the broader context of sensory studies in order to explain how the genre of the novel can impact on our perception of ourselves and our social contexts. Taking cultural literary studies ahead, the book re-integrates aesthetics – a much fraught concept in cultural studies that long favoured ‘popular'over ‘high culture'– into cultural studies as aisthetics in the word's root sense of ‘perception'. Zooming in on period shifts and changes in taste spanning realism, sensation fiction and aestheticism, aisthetics reveals how these shifts also pertain to new ways of perceiving in selected novels by George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Vernon Lee. Connecting Victorian and current literary theories, aisthetics helps explore the way in which the novel can shape the way we perceive the world, what remains excluded from the realm of the perceivable and how our conduct is consequently always also influenced by the dominant genres of our time.

Is the novel a category of knowledge that merits serious study? Even if the novel has shed the stigma of being mindless entertainment, one might easily assume that reading a novel is not'studying,'unless one reads closely and carefully, preferably from a scholarly edition or for a scholarly purpose. Novel Pedagogy explores how Victorian writers envisioned the novel's potential to become knowledge long before the form's ascendence into the ivory tower. Liwen Zhang argues that Victorian novelists'constant critique of schooling, on the one hand, and their frequent invocation of deep knowledge, on the other, are not self-contradictory. Instead of offering a blissful escape from education, writers such as William Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and George Gissing seek to offer uniquely novelistic pathways to knowledge. Novel Pedagogy offers a new model of novelistic epistemology by showing how the novel, unlike other educational genres, reflects on the unpleasant realities of learning—and of not learning—amid the ubiquity of ineffective textbooks, reluctant students, and false motivations.

How Victorian authors engaged the imaginations of their readers and elevated the novel to new heightsAs novel publication exploded in nineteenth-century Britain, writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot learned from experience—sometimes grudgingly—that readers tend to make their own imaginative contributions to fictional worlds. Imagining Otherwise shows how Victorian writers acknowledged, grappled with, and ultimately enlisted the prerogative of readers to conjure alternatives and add depth to the words on the page.Debra Gettelman provides incisive new readings of novels such as Sense and Sensibility, Little Dorrit, and Middlemarch, exploring how novelists known for prescriptive and didactic narrative voices were at the same time exploring the aesthetic potential for the reader's independent imagination to lend nuance and authenticity to fiction. Modernist authors of the twentieth century have long been considered pioneers in cultivating the reader's capacity to imagine what is not said as part of the art of fiction. Gettelman uncovers the roots of this tradition of novel reading a century earlier and challenges literary criticism that dismisses this spontaneous, readerly impulse as being unworthy of serious examination.As readers demand novels with relatable characters and fan fiction grows in popularity, the reader's imagination has become a determining element of today's literary environment. Imagining Otherwise takes a deeper look at this history, offering a critical perspective on how we came to view fiction as a site of imaginative appropriation.

This book re-reads the relationship between the Victorian sensation novel and modernity. Whereas critics have long recognized its appearance in the form of nervous subjects and technologically-enabled mobility, Green contends that sensation fiction also depicts modernity in the form of intellectual and moral discontinuity. Through closely historicist readings of novels by Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, as well as by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Rhoda Broughton, this book traces how discontinuity is manifested in the suspenseful plotting of these fictions, through which readers are challenged to revise conventional assumptions about the world and adopt more contingent perspectives. The study demonstrates that reading for this sense of modernity does not merely uncover the genre's engagements with various mid-century contexts. More fundamentally, it broaches a new sense of the function and significance of sensation fiction: the acclimatization of its readers to the discontinuities of modern existence.

Friends are at the centre of novels by everyone from George Eliot to Elena Ferrante. It is nearly impossible to name a work of fiction that is not enriched by the tensions and magnetisms of friendship.Friendship and the Novel focuses on the affective and narrative possibilities created by friendship in fiction. Friendship enables plots about rivalry, education, compassion, pity, deceit, betrayal, animosity, and breakup. It crosses boundaries of gender, class, nationality, disposition, race, age, and experience. Some novels offer lessons about distinguishing good friends from bad. In a Bildungsroman, friends contribute to the development of the protagonist through example or advice, as if novels were manuals for making and keeping friends. Sometimes sparks fly between friends and friendship swerves into sexual intimacy. Sally Rooney and other contemporary writers take friendship online.The essays in Friendship and the Novel illustrate how friendship, in its many forms – short or lifelong, intense or circumstantial – is a central problem and an abiding mystery in fiction as in life, a subject that continues to shape the novel as a literary form and, in turn, its readers.Contributors include Robert L. Caserio (Penn State), Maria DiBattista (Princeton), Jay Dickson (Reed), Brian Gingrich (Texas), Jonathan Greenberg (Montclair State), Barry McCrea (Notre Dame), Deborah Epstein Nord (Princeton), Erwin Rosinberg (Emory), Jacqueline Shin (Towson), Lisa Sternlieb (Penn State), and Emily Wittman (Alabama).

The environment concept has shaped humanity's relationship to the natural world and has drawn attention to the effects of human actions on our natural surroundings. But when did we learn that we live in an environment? While scholars have often located the emergence of the environment concept in twentieth-century ecological and political thought, Novel Environments: Science, Description, and Victorian Fiction reconstructs a longer—and a specifically literary—history. It was in the descriptive worldmaking of the Victorian novel that the environment was first transformed from an abstraction into a vivid object of imagination and feeling. Engaging the scientific theories of their contemporaries, Mary Russell Mitford, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Louis Stevenson turned to detailed description—from gardens and landscapes to weather and atmospheres-to model interactions between life and its surroundings. Far from merely furnishing static background, the descriptive apparatus of the Victorian novel imagined the nonhuman environment as dynamically involved with human action, feeling, and development. In making this argument, Novel Environments recovers the scientific vocabulary the Victorians used to name the surroundings of living organisms. The word'environment'dominates our own way of speaking about the nonhuman world, but nineteenth-century scientific writers and novelists availed themselves of a richer conceptual lexicon, which included'environment'along with less familiar concepts such as'milieu,''medium,'and'circumstance.'Jayne Hildebrand traces the development of Victorian environmental thought from the earliest theorization of physical surroundings as a dynamic influence in the life sciences, through the idea of a singular'medium'in mid-century organicism, to the conception of the planet as an environmental system at the fin-de-siècle. By showing how novelistic description helped to produce the modern environment concept, Hildebrand sheds new light on the relationship between Victorian literature and the life sciences, and reveals how literary form has shaped the ecological ideas through which we apprehend the nonhuman world.

In Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel—the first book-length study of the topic—Livia Arndal Woods traces the connections between literary treatments of pregnancy and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth occurring over the long nineteenth century. Woods uses the problem of pregnancy in the Victorian novel (in which pregnancy is treated modestly as a rule and only rarely as an embodied experience) to advocate for “somatic reading,” a practice attuned to impressions of the body on the page and in our own messy lived experiences. Examining works by Emily Brontë, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and others, Woods considers instances of pregnancy that are tied to representations of immodesty, poverty, and medical diagnosis. These representations, Woods argues, should be understood in the arc of Anglo-American modernity and its aftershocks, connecting backward to early modern witch trials and forward to the criminalization of women for pregnancy outcomes in twenty-first-century America. Ultimately, she makes the case that by clearing space for the personal and anecdotal in scholarship, somatic reading helps us analyze with uncertainty rather than against it and allows for richer and more relevant textual interpretation.

In this book, Amy R. Wong unravels the colonial and racial logic behind seemingly innocuous assumptions about'speech': that our words belong to us, and that self-possession is a virtue. Through readings of late-Victorian fictions of empire, Wong revisits the scene of speech's ideological foreclosures as articulated in postcolonial theory. Engaging Afro-Caribbean thinkers like Édouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter, Refiguring Speech reroutes attention away from speech and toward an anticolonial poetics of talk, which emphasizes communal ownership and embeddedness within the social world and material environment. Analyzing novels by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, George Meredith, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, Wong refashions the aesthetics of disordered speech—such as parroting, eavesdropping, profuse inarticulacy, and dysfluency—into alternate forms of communication that stand on their own as talk. Wong demonstrates how late nineteenth-century Britain's twin crises of territorialization—of empire and of new media—spurred narrative interests in capturing the sense that speech's tethering to particular persons was no longer tenable. In doing so, Wong connects this period to US empire by constructing a genealogy of Anglo-American speech's colonialist and racialized terms of proprietorship. Refiguring Speech offers students and scholars of Victorian literature and postcolonial studies a powerful conceptualization of talk as an insurgent form of communication.

A 2023 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic TitleThis book addresses the ways in which Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë took advantage of the rapid change of their time unleashed by the Industrial Revolution in order to illustrate the inequalities women faced in the Victorian Age. It historically contextualizes all seven novels, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Shirley, Villette, and The Professor, in order to investigate the themes of marriage, education, class, and work. Specifically, the author examines the ways the Brontë sisters decenter marriage, call for equality in education, expose the inherent dignity of humans despite class differences, and demonstrate the ways in which increased work opportunities empowered women. Ultimately, the author argues that the Brontë sisters'call for female empowerment was symptomatic of the age, and one that is realized in the latter half of the Victorian Age and beyond.

Women's Literary Portraits in the Victorian and Neo-Victorian Novel is a dialogical and intertextual journey through the pages of nineteenth-century novels and their modern, revisionary counterparts. It is the book not only dedicated to the readers associated with academia, but also to all literature enthusiasts, students of literature, and those readers who are fascinated by the Victorian novel, as well as by its current neo-Victorian revival. The focus of this work revolves around the literary portrayals of Victorian and neo-Victorian women who, as the authoress believes, are located in the centre of socio-cultural and historical narratives shaping both the past and the present. Nineteenth-century narratives concerning women's placement and status in the Victorian social landscape are currently revived on the pages of neo-Victorian novels, thus attesting to the unceasing interest in the bygone. While neo-Victorian revisionary fiction endows nineteenth-century women with a redemptive potential, it also exposes modern paradoxes and ambiguities connected with universal expectations towards women, what further approximates our contemporaneity to the Victorian past. While examining these socio-cultural ambivalences, the authoress celebrates Victorian and neo-Victorian women characters in their attempts to thrive as individuals. Consequently, the book studies Victorian and neo-Victorian women characters in relation to their identities, unique voices and textual garments.

How did Victorian novelists engage with the new theories of human intelligence that emerged from late nineteenth-century psychology and evolutionary science? Assessing Intelligence traces the genealogy of the modern concept of IQ. It examines how five writers – George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, HG Wells and Virginia Woolf – used the bildungsroman, or the novel of education, to wrestle with the moral and political implications of the IQ model of intelligence and the fantasies of meritocracy it provoked. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, Sara Lyons argues that Victorian and Edwardian novelists were by turns complicit in the biopolitics of intelligence and sought radical ways to affirm the equality of minds.

Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction explores the dialogue between popular literature and medical and scientific discourse in terms of how they represent the highly visible an pathologized British aristocratic body. This books explores and complicates the two major portrayals of aristocrats in nineteenth-century literature: that of the medicalised, frail, debauched, and diseased aristocrat, and that of the heroic, active, beautiful ‘noble', both of which are frequent and resonant in popular fiction of the long nineteenth century. Abigail Boucher argues that the concept of class in the long nineteenth century implicitly includes notions of blood, lineage, and bodily ‘correctness', and that ‘class'was therefore frequently portrayed as an empirical, scientific, and medical certainty. Due to their elevated and highly visual social positions, both historical and fictional aristocrats were frequently pathologized in the public mind and watchedfor signs of physical excellence or deviance. Using popular fiction, Boucher establishes patterns across decades, genres, and demographics and considers how these patterns react to, normalise, or feed into the advent of new scientific and medical understandings.

This Pivot engages with current debates about anthropocentrism and the Anthropocene to propose a reappraisal of the realist novel in the second half of the nineteenth century. Through three case studies, it argues for ‘human tissue'as a conceptual tool for reading that brings together biology, literature and questions of layering. This new approach is shown to be especially salient to the Victorian period, when the application of ‘tissue'to biology first emerges. The book is distinctive in bringing together theoretical concerns around realism and the Anthropocene – two major topics in literary criticism – and presenting a new methodology to approach this conjunction, demonstrated through original readings of Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, and Emile Zola and two English-language writers he influenced (George Moore and Vernon Lee).

For centuries, English-language writers have borrowed words and phrases from other languages in their fictional works. Words in Collision explores this tradition of language-mixing and its consequences. Returning to Shakespeare's Henry V, Michael Ross asks why writers employ “foreign” phrases in their English-language texts, why this practice continues, and what it means. He finds that the insertion of “foreign elements,” rather than random or arbitrary, occurs in literary works that display a self-conscious preoccupation with language in general as a dynamic determinant of social relations. Discussing nineteenth-century works by Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, and Henry James, the book demonstrates how multilingualism connects with themes of cosmopolitanism, estrangement, and resistance to social convention. In the second half of the book, the multilingual practices of canonical Anglo-American literature are compared with postcolonial texts by Caribbean, Nigerian, and Indian authors, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Arundhati Roy, whose choice of language is fraught with complex moral and artistic implications. Ross's readings reveal both crucial departures and surprising underlying continuities in linguistic traditions often thought to be deeply divided in time, space, and politics. The first extended treatment of language-mixing in English texts, Words in Collision is critical to understanding past practices and future prospects for multilingualism in fiction.

Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status recovers the novelistic pervasiveness of a Reform-Era rhetorical form, the negative assertion of value, which grounds middle-class claims to social authority in repudiations of such conventional warrants as birth, wealth, numerical preponderance, command of fact and, specifically for women, the symbolic phallus. Bringing together historical, literary and sociological theory, this study recaptures the Victorians'broad sense of epistemological uncertainty about their rapidly changing society, reconstructs novelists'specific attempts to legitimate their traditionally low-status genre and offers fresh readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William North, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Yonge, among others.

Twilight Histories explores the relationship between nostalgia and the Victorian historical novel, arguing that both responded to the turbulence brought by accelerating modernisation. Nostalgia began as a pathological homesickness, its first victims seventeenth-century soldiers serving abroad. Only gradually did it become the sentimental memory we understand it as today. In a striking parallel to nostalgia's origin, the historical novel emerged in the tumultuous early-years of the nineteenth century, at a time when the Napoleonic Wars once again set troops on the move, creating a new wave of homesick soldiers. In the historical novels of Gaskell, Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy, nostalgia offered a language in which to describe the experience of living through changing times as a homesickness for history. Twilight Histories has been included in Oxford Bibliographies'Historical Novel category, where it has been reviewed as “[a]n illuminating study of mid-Victorian novels of the recent past—the period of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.”

Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children's violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with the standard picture of domestic childhood across that period. Instead, they seem to attest to the kinds of enactments of infant distress we would normally associate with post-psychoanalytic modernity, creating a ripple effect in the literary texts that nest them: regressing developmental narratives, giving new value to wooden characters, exposing Realism's solid objects to odd fracture, and troubling distinctions between artificial and authentic interiority. Toy Stories is the first study to take these scenes of anger and overwhelm seriously, challenging received ideas about both the nineteenth century and its literary forms. Radically re-conceiving nineteenth-century childhood and its literary depiction as anticipat­ing the scenes, theories, and methodologies of early child analysis, Toy Stories proposes a shared literary and psychoanalytic discernment about child's play that in turn provides a deep context for understanding both the “development” of the novel and the keen British uptake of Melanie Klein's and Anna Freud's interventions in child therapy. In doing so, the book provides a necessary reframing of the work of Klein and Freud and their fractious disagreement about the interior life of the child and its object-mediated manifestations.

The first book-length investigation of the history of pre-chapter epigraphs in the English novelOffers detailed insight into the development and function of the epigraph from 1750 to 1850Demonstrates the enduring versatility of the epigraph and of paratextual approaches to literary criticismPresents a survey of pre-chapter paratext in English fiction first-published between 1750 and 1850, drawing upon a dataset of nearly 6000 novelsProvides case studies of epigraphs in the works of canonical authors (e.g. Radcliffe, Lewis, Scott, and Gaskell), and places these within a wider context of epigraphic and literary development in fiction by influential, though less well-known, writers (Chaigneau, Helme, Stannard Barrett, Gore)Epigraphs in the English Novel 1750-1850 uncovers the early history of the epigraph, narrating the surprising story of how this long-overlooked feature morphed from moral didactic heading to Gothic tag-line to witty realist commentary within a single century. Adorning fictional narratives of rakes and sex workers, oppressed heroines and Jacobite heroes, the epigraph has been used by authors to preach, teach, amuse, or even completely misdirect their readers. Supported by a survey of pre-chapter paratext in nearly 6000 novels from 1750 to 1850, this monograph explores the changing influences upon and functions of epigraphs over time via detailed close readings and literary criticism. Focusing upon key generic developments, this book adopts a case-study style format to examine epigraphic usage in the works of canonical authors including Sarah Fielding, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, and Elizabeth Gaskell alongside those of less well-known novelists such as William Chaigneau, Elizabeth Helme, and Catherine Gore.

In The Feeling of Letting Die, Jennifer MacLure explores how Victorian novels depict the feelings that both fuel and are produced by an economic system that lets some people die in service of the free market. MacLure argues that Victorian authors present capitalism's death function as a sticking point, a series of contradictions, and a problem to solve as characters grapple with systems that allow, demand, and cause the deaths of their less fortunate fellows. Utilizing Achille Mbembe's theorization of necropolitics, MacLure uses the term “necroeconomics,” positioning Victorian authors—even those who were deeply committed to liberal capitalism—as hyperaware of capitalism's death function. Examining both canonical and lesser-known works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, William Morris, and George Eliot, The Feeling of Letting Die shows capitalism as not straightforwardly imposed via economic policy but instead as a system functioning through the emotions and desires of the human beings who enact it. In doing so, MacLure reveals how emotion functions as both the legitimating epistemic mode of capitalism and its most salient threat.

In Gone Girls, 1684-1901, Nora Gilbert argues that the persistent trope of female characters running away from some iteration of'home'played a far more influential role in the histories of both the rise of the novel and the rise of modern feminism than previous accounts have acknowledged. For as much as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel may have worked to establish the private, middle-class, domestic sphere as the rightful (and sole) locus of female authority in the ways that prior critics have outlined, it was also continually showing its readers female characters who refused to buy into such an agenda--refusals which resulted, strikingly often, in those characters'physical flights from home. The steady current of female flight coursing through this body of literature serves as a powerful counterpoint to the ideals of feminine modesty and happy homemaking it was expected officially to endorse, and challenges some of novel studies'most accepted assumptions. Just as the #MeToo movement has used the tool of repeated, aggregated storytelling to take a stand against contemporary rape culture, Gone Girls, 1684-1901 identifies and amplifies a recurrent strand of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British storytelling that served both to emphasize the prevalence of gendered injustices throughout the period and to narrativize potential ways and means for readers facing such injustices to rebel, resist, and get out.

Revealing how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representation of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain, Lauren Gillingham offers a revisionist history of the novel. With particular attention to the fiction of the 1820s through 1840s, this study focuses on novels that use fashion's idiom of currency and obsolescence to link narrative form to a heightened sense of the present and the visibility of public life. It contends that novelists steeped their fiction in date-stamped matters of dress, manners, and media sensations to articulate a sense of history as unfolding not in epochal change, but in transient issues and interests capturing the public's imagination. Reading fiction by Mary Shelley, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others, Fashionable Fictions tells the story of a nineteenth-century genre commitment to contemporaneity that restyles the novel itself.

A revelatory reading of the British novel that considers interfaith marriage, religious toleration, and the ethics of sociability.Bringing together feminist theory, novel criticism, and religious studies, Alison Conway's Sacred Engagements advances a postsecular reading of the novel that links religious tolerance and the eighteenth-century marriage plot. Conway explores the historical roots of the vexed questions that interfaith marriage continues to raise today. She argues that narrative wields the power to imagine conjugal and religious relations that support the embodied politics crucial to a communal, rather than state-sponsored, ethics of toleration.Conway studies the communal and gendered aspects of religious experience embedded in Samuel Richardson's account of interfaith marriage and liberalism's understandings of toleration in Sir Charles Grandison. In her readings of Frances Brooke, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Maria Edgeworth, Conway considers how women authors reframe the questions posed by Grandison, representing intimacy, authorship, and women's religious subjectivity in ways that challenge the social and political norms of Protestant British culture. She concludes with reflections on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and the costs of a marriage plot that insists on religious conformity. By examining the complex epistemologies of the interfaith marriage plot, Sacred Engagements counters the secularization thesis that has long dominated eighteenth-century novel studies. In so doing, the book recognizes those subjects otherwise ignored by liberal political theory and extrapolates how a genuinely inclusive tolerance might be imagined in our own deeply divided times.

Imagining Women's Property in Victorian Fiction reframes how we think about Victorian women's changing economic rights and their representation in nineteenth-century novels. The reform of married women's property law between 1856 and 1882 constituted one of the largest economic transformations England had ever seen, as well as one of its most significant challenges to family traditions. By the end of this period, women who had once lost their common-law property rights to their husbands reclaimed their own assets, regained economic agency, and forever altered the legal and theoretical nature of wedlock by doing so. Yet in literary accounts, reforms were neither as decisive as the law implied nor limited to marriage. Legal rights frequently clashed with other family claims, and the reallocation of wealth affected far more than spouses or the marital state. Competition between wives and children is just one of many ways in which Victorian fiction suggests the perceived benefits and threats of property reform. In nineteenth-century fiction, portrayals of women's claims to ownership provide insight into the social networks forged through property transactions and also offer a lens to examine a wide range of other social matters, including testamentary practices, wills, and copyright law; economic and evolutionary models of mutuality; the twin dangers of greed and generosity; inheritance and custody rights; the economic ramifications of loyalty and family obligation; and the legacy of nineteenth-century economic practices for women today. Understanding the reform of married women's property as both an ideologically and materially substantial redistribution of the nation's wealth as well as one complicated by competing cultural traditions, this book explores the widespread ways in which women's financial agency was imagined by fiction that engages with but also diverges from the law in accounts of economic choices and transactions. Repeatedly, narratives by Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, and Oliphant suggest both that the law is inadequate to account for the way that property enables and disrupts relationships, and that the form of the Victorian novel - in its ability to track intimate and intricate exchanges across generations - is better suited to such tasks.

Minor characters are everywhere in novels. They linger with readers and invite us into the untold aspects of their lives. They fill a text's landscape, bringing depth to its ecosystem, and encourage us to shift our thoughts from textual centers to margins and even to consider the minor elements of our own experiences. Minor characters challenge us to hold oppositional perspectives, rethink interdependencies, and reimagine textual and lived relationships. In many ways, we identify with minor characters, and yet we lack a nuanced way of understanding them. This work is about minor characters and the qualities of'minorness'in Victorian novels. It offers casual readers and scholars alike a method of reading and rereading for minor characters that extends across genres.

Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic breaks new ground in uncovering penny titles which have been hitherto largely neglected from literary discourse revealing the cultural, social and literary significance of these working-class texts. The present volume is a reappraisal of penny dreadfuls, demonstrating their cruciality in both our understanding of working-class Victorian Literature and the Gothic mode. This edited collection of essays provides new insights into the fields of Victorian literature, popular culture and Gothic fiction more broadly; it is divided into three sections, whose titles replicate the dual titles offered by penny publications during the nineteenth century. Sections one and two consist of three chapters, while section three consists of four essays, all of which intertwine to create an in-depth and intertextual exposition of Victorian society, literature, and gothic representations.

This Presidential address was delivered to the Scottish Branch, Nov. 22, 1930.Das E-Book The Novel and the Fairy Tale wird angeboten von Alien Ebooks und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert: speech;literature;novels;fairy tales;literary criticism

Heroic Disobedience: The Forced Marriage Plot and the British Novel, 1747-1880'shows the ways in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels used what the author terms the forced marriage plot - a plot arc in which a greedy father tries to force his daughter into a marriage she does not want but that would be financially expedient to himself - to explore capitalism's detrimental impacts on women's right to autonomy. As capitalist economic practices replaced mercantilism, a woman's value was seen primarily in the economic sense. That is, men came to recognize that women – especially young, marriageable women – could be used as objects of exchange between men. Recognizing this phenomenon, the novelists considered in'Heroic Disobedience'– Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Lennox, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Stone, and Anthony Trollope – depict the very specific ways in which women were raised to become willing pawns in this system. Religious discourse, conduct guides, marriage and property laws, wages, lack of meaningful education, and inheritance practices combined to leave women with no other options besides dependence on their patriarchs. Importantly, authors who use the forced marriage plot go beyond exposing women's subjugation by creating – and celebrating – heroically disobedient heroines who believe, above all else, that they have the right to determine their own futures: futures in which they are autonomous agents, not subjected objects.

Positions the sensation novel, and nineteenth-century popular fiction more generally, as vital to the history of feelingArgues for the literary significance of this popular formExamines work by lesser-known female writers, such as Caroline Clive, Annie Edwards and Florence WilfordDemonstrates that sensationalism can be traced across a wide range of writers and genres, from spasmodic poetry to the novels of Louisa May AlcottConnects Victorian writing on feeling to contemporary affect theoryNarrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies argues that Victorian sensation novels – long dismissed as plot-driven, silly, and feminine – develop complex theories of narrative affect, our embodied responses to reading, imagining, and even writing a narrative. The popular sensation novel thus should be understood as a key contribution to the novel's assessment of its own workings, especially the ways in which reading and writing figure as affective acts. Additionally, the book radically expands the field of sensation fiction, taking seriously lesser-known female authors, and reading them alongside a range of writers not typically considered sensational. These novels insist that feelings are not bound to a single body and that bodies generate meaning when they are put in relation to other bodies and systems of knowledge.

This book is about what does not happen in the Victorian novel. The description may sound absurd, yet consideration of alternatives to a given state of affairs is crucial to our understanding of a novel. Plot emerges out of the gradual elimination of possibilities, from the revelation, on the first page of a work, that we are in nineteenth-century London and not sixteenth-century Paris, to the final disclosure that Pip returns home too late to marry Biddy but is now free to pursue his lost love Estella.Through careful examination of the plots of such classics as Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, Charlotte Brontë's Villette, Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Henry James's The Ambassadors, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and others, Glatt argues for the central role of these'unwritten plots'in Victorian narrative construction. Abandoning the allegorical mode—in which characters are bound by fixed identities to reach a predetermined conclusion—and turning away from classical and historical plots with outcomes already known to audiences, the realist novel of the Victorian era was designed to simulate the openness and uncertainty of ordinary human experience. We are invested in these stories of David Copperfield or Elizabeth Bennet or Lucy Snowe in part because we cannot be entirely sure how those stories will end. As Glatt demonstrates, the Victorian novel is characterized by a proliferation of possibilities.

Critics agree in the abstract that'metafiction'refers to any novel that draws attention to its own fictional construction, but metafiction has been largely associated with the postmodern era. In this innovative new book Tabitha Sparks identifies a sustained pattern of metafiction in the Victorian novel that illuminates the art and intentions of its female practitioners.From the mid-nineteenth century through the fin de siècle, novels by Victorian women such as Charlotte Brontë, Rhoda Broughton, Charlotte Riddell, Eliza Lynn Linton, and several New Women authors share a common but underexamined trope: the fictional characterization of the woman novelist or autobiographer. Victorian Metafiction reveals how these novels systemically dispute the assumptions that women wrote primarily about their emotions or were restricted to trivial, sentimental plots.Countering an established tradition that has read novels by women writers as heavily autobiographical and confessional, Sparks identifies the literary technique of metafiction in numerous novels by women writers and argues that women used metafictional self-consciousness to draw the reader's attention to the book and not the novelist. By dislodging the narrative from these cultural prescriptions, Victorian Metafiction effectively argues how these women novelists presented the business and art of writing as the subject of the novel and wrote metafiction in order to establish their artistic integrity and professional authority.

In the first hundred years of the UK rail network, the seaside figures as a nerve centre, managing and making visible the period's complex interplay between health, death, gender and sexuality. This monograph discusses around 130 novels of the railway age to show how the seaside infiltrates a diverse range of literature, subverting the boundaries between high and low literary culture. The seaside holiday galvanises innovative literary forms, including early twentieth-century holiday crime and romance fiction, which has its origins in the sensational strategies of mid-nineteenth-century authors. Where reading takes place is at least as important as what is read, and case studies on literary Brighton and Dickensian Kent explore the occasionally fraught relationship between seaside towns and the metropolis, as London visitors are represented in – and are the target audience for – literary accounts of the seaside holiday. The act of reading by the sea is itself overdetermined and problematic, a dilemma that is managed in part through the development of text-free literary tourism in the late nineteenth century. Deploying strategies from literary criticism, histories of reading, libraries and the book, and literary tourism, this book recovers ‘seaside reading'as both a literary sub-genre and a deeply contested mode of engagement.

Drawing on the figure and discourses of the Victorian fin-de-siècle New Woman, this book examines women writers who struggled with conservative, patriarchal ideologies of motherhood in novels, periodicals and life writings of the long modernist period. It shows how these writers challenged, resisted, adapted and negotiated traditional ideas with their own versions of new motherhood, with needs for identities and experiences beyond maternity. Tracing the period from the end of the nineteenth century through the twentieth, this study explores how some of the numerous elements and forces we identify with modernism are manifested in equally diverse and often competing representations of mothers, mothering and motherhood. It investigates how historical personages and fictional protagonists used and were constructed within textual spaces where they engaged critically with the maternal as institution, identity and practice, from perspectives informed by gender, sexuality, nationhood, race and class. The matrifocal literatures examined in this book exemplify how feminist motherhoods feature as a prominent thematic of the long modernist era and how rebellious New Woman mothers provocatively wrote maternity into text and history.

British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965: Facts and Fictions conceptualizes detective fiction as an archive, i.e., a trove of documents and sources to be used for historical interpretation. By framing the genre as a shifting set of values, definitions, and practices, the book historicizes the contested meanings of analytical categories like class, race, gender, nation, and empire that have been applied to the forms and functions of detection. Three organizing themes structure this investigation: fictive facticity, genre fluidity, and conservative modernity. This volume thus shows how British detective fiction from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century both shaped and was shaped by its social, cultural, and political contexts and the lived experience of its authors and readers at critical moments in time.

Bazaar Literature reorients our understanding of Victorian social reform fiction by reading it in light of the copious amount of literature generated for charity bazaars. Bazaars were ubiquitous during the nineteenth century, part of the vibrant and massive private sector response to a rapidly industrializing society. Typically organized and run by women, charity bazaars were often called'fancy fairs'since they specialized in ladies'hand-crafted'fancy'work. Indeed, they were a key method women used to intervene in political, social, and cultural affairs. Yet their conventional purpose--to raise money for charity--has led to their being widely overlooked and misunderstood. Bazaar Literature remedies these misconceptions by demonstrating how the literature written in conjunction with bazaars shaped the social, political, and literary movements of its time. This study draws upon a wide variety of texts printed to be sold at bazaars, including literature by Robert Louis Stevenson, Harriet Martineau, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, alongside fictional depictions of fancy fairs by Charlotte Yonge, George Eliot, Frances Trollope, and Anthony Trollope. The book revises our understanding of the larger literary market in social reform fiction, revealing a parodic, self-critical strain that is paradoxically braided with strident political activism and its realist sensibilities.

The modern-day suburb began, and began booming, in 19th-century Britain. As suburbia spread, the New Woman arose and fin-de-siecle concerns grew, suburban men felt more besieged. Anxieties about hygiene, pollution, purity, the home, class, gender roles, patrilineal power and the state of the Empire rippled through British fiction. The new man of the house was trying, often desperately, to hold onto the old order, changing even more rapidly as the 20th century and modernist fiction arrived. This study traces suburban masculinities in popular genres--speculative fiction, comic fiction and detective fiction--and in literary works from the late-Victorian era to the start of the First World War.

Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction challenges literary studies to attend to surfaces rather than interpretation through a history of how we came to think about emotion, empathy and reading fiction as intertwined ideas. Against professional readers, writers of popular fiction argued that emotional reading and sensational novels cultivated an ethics of care. They turned to Associationism – an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science that understood mental phenomena through physiology – to understand language as a physiological process that draws bodies together. Emotional reading cultivated empathy in popular readers, and imbued popular fiction with cultural value.

The first full-length study of identity fraud in literature, Personation Plots argues that concerns about identity and the body gripped the Victorian consciousness. The mid-nineteenth century was marked by extensive medico-legal efforts to understand the body as the sole signifier of identity. The sensation genre, which enjoyed remarkable popularity in the 1860s and 1870s, at once reflected and challenged this discourse. In their frequent representations of identity fraud, sensation writers demonstrated that the body could never guarantee a person's identity. The body is malleable and untrustworthy, and the identity it is supposed to signify is governed by the caprices of the human mind and the growing authority of paper matter. Both a wide-ranging literary analysis and a portrait of the age, Personation Plots reads canonical texts by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens alongside several lesser-known sensation novels. The study, which anticipates debates over biometric identification practices in our own time, also features brief criminal biographies of two of the nineteenth century's greatest impostors, Alice Grey and Mary Jane Furneaux, and concludes with an afterword on imposture in the late-Victorian Gothic.

Literature in the Dawn of Sociological Theory: Stories That Are Telling focuses on a selection of novelists from the early 1800s to the early 1900s and their connections to the insights of Classical Sociological Theory and the sociological imagination. This monograph also considers the aesthetic, sociological, and literary insights of Theodor Adorno, György Lukács, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Wolf Lepenies, Franco Moretti, Lucien Goldmann, and John Orr. The main chapters discuss the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The concluding chapter reflects on the dawn of modernity, especially the birth of capitalism and the plague crisis via Boccaccio's Florence, significant to The Decameron. Throughout the text, Sarah Louise MacMillen considers these “stories that are telling” in light of social issues today. She presents a case for highlighting the authors of the past, wherein these fictional accounts anticipate some of our contemporary social problems and social movements. These dynamics include the environmental crisis, the effects of globalization, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, “cancel culture,” debates about gender nonconformity, and secularization. Finally, MacMillen reflects on the need for solidarity in shifting patterns of social existence and rebuilding post-COVID.

Inspecting Psychology takes a sleuth's magnifying glass to the interplay between psychology, psychiatry and detective fiction to provide a unique examination of the history of psychology. As psychology evolved over the centuries, so did crime writing. This book looks at how the psychological movements of the time influenced classic authors from Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle to Dorothy Sayers and Georges Simenon, to reveal an enduring connection between psychology and the human need to solve mysteries. Some key puzzles. Why did Agatha Christie make so many doctors killers in her books? Why did Simenon not become a psychiatrist? Did Lord Peter Wimsey have all the charm, passion and tenderness no lover gave Dorothy Sayers?Beginning with the earliest origins of psychology in Greek literature alongside the Oedipal story and the ideas of Aristotle, the book travels through to the late 18th and 19th centuries and the work of Edgar Allan Poe who wrote the first detective story proper. With the birth of modern psychology in the late 19th century, the growing fascination with understanding behaviour coincided with the popular whodunnit. Readers are whisked through the development of psychology in the 20th century and beyond, from the impact of shell shock in the First World War and the early understanding of mental illness through to the growth of psychoanalysis and the ideas of Freud, behaviourism and attachment theory. At every stop on this original rattle through history, David Cohen reveals the influence these psychological movements had on crime writers and their characters and plots. The result is a highly enjoyable, engaging read for those interested in how the unique pairing of the history of psychology with the history of the detective novel can unveil insights into the human condition. It should appeal to anyone interested in psychology who wants their subject served with a thriller on the side.