The National Book League was a precursor to the current Booktrust, issued Reader's Guides on a variety of subjects, each written by an author with expertise in that field. Originally published in 1947, this volume is devoted to Victorian fiction, covering a broad range of genres and subject matter.
The ubiquity of horses in literary texts, visual media, and other cultural documents indicates a vibrant cult of the horse during the Victorian Period. Treating the novels of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Braddon, Anna Sewell, and George Moore, Gina M. Dorr
With over 900 biographical entries, more than 600 novels synopsized, and a wealth of background material on the publishers, reviewers and readers of the age the Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction is the fullest account of the period's fiction ever published. Now in a second edition, the book has been revised and a generous selection of images have been chosen to illustrate various aspects of Victorian publishing, writing, and reading life. Organised alphabetically, the information provided will be a boon to students, researchers and all lovers of reading. The entries, though concise, meet the high standards demanded by modern scholarship. The writing - marked by Sutherland's characteristic combination of flair, clarity and erudition - is of such a high standard that the book is a joy to read, as well as a definitive work of reference.
The Victorian period was the age of the novel and critics at the time clearly saw the importance of prose fiction. First published in 1993, this anthology contains over fifty original extracts from contemporary critics on the early and mid-Victorian novel. Arranged thematically, the volume covers such topics as literary form, the social responsibility of literature, issues of politics and gender, the influence of criticism, realism, plot and characterisation, imagination and creativity, and the office and social standing of the novelist. The introductions and notes draw together the large number of voices and guide the reader through the Victorian literary critical debate. This accessible and invaluable guide will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature.
Criticism about the neo-Victorian novel — a genre of historical fiction that re-imagines aspects of the Victorian world from present-day perspectives — has expanded rapidly in the last fifteen years but given little attention to the engagement between science and religion. Of great interest to Victorians, this subject often appears in neo-Victorian novels including those by such well-known authors as John Fowles, A. S. Byatt, Graham Swift, and Mathew Kneale. This book discusses novels in which nineteenth-century science, including geology, paleontology, and evolutionary theory, interacts with religion through accommodations, conflicts, and crises of faith. In general, these texts abandon conventional religion but retain the ethical connectedness and celebration of life associated with spirituality at its best. Registering the growth of nineteenth-century secularism and drawing on aspects of the romantic tradition and ecological thinking, they honor the natural world without imagining that it exists for humans or functions in reference to human values. In particular, they enact a form of wonderment: the capacity of the mind to make sense of, creatively adapt, and enjoy the world out of which it has evolved — in short, to endow it with meaning. Protagonists who come to experience reality in this expansive way release themselves from self-anxiety and alienation. In this book, Glendening shows how, by intermixing past and present, fact and fiction, neo-Victorian narratives, with a few instructive exceptions, manifest this pattern.
This book provides a comprehensive reflection of the processes of canonization, (un)pleasurable consumption and the emerging predominance of topics and theoretical concerns in neo-Victorianism. The repetitions and reiterations of the Victorian in contemporary culture document an unbroken fascination with the histories, technologies and achievements, as well as the injustices and atrocities, of the nineteenth century. They also reveal that, in many ways, contemporary identities are constructed through a Victorian mirror image fabricated by the desires, imaginings and critical interests of the present. Providing analyses of current negotiations of nineteenth-century texts, discourses and traumas, this volume explores the contemporary commodification and nostalgic recreation of the past. It brings together critical perspectives of experts in the fields of Victorian literature and culture, contemporary literature, and neo-Victorianism, with contributions by leading scholars in the field including Rosario Arias, Cora Kaplan, Elizabeth Ho, Marie-Luise Kohlke and Sally Shuttleworth. Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture interrogates current fashions in neo-Victorianism and their ideological leanings, the resurrection of cultural icons, and the reasons behind our relationship with and immersion in Victorian culture.
This is an eclectic collection of essays from a group of international scholars tackling various subjects on Victorian literature—from studies of specific authors such Charles Dickens’ early and later works, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and novels by Thomas Hardy to more general discussions, such as the depictions of women in Victorian novels.
This inspiring survey challenges conventional ways of viewing theVictorian novel. Provides time maps and overviews of historical and socialcontexts. Considers the relationship between the Victorian novel andhistorical, religious and bibliographic writing. Features short biographies of over forty Victorian authors,including Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and RobertLouis Stevenson. Offers close readings of over 30 key texts, among themCharlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and BramStoker’s Dracula (1897), as well as key presences,such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (Pt 1,1676, Pt 2, 1684). Also covers topics such as colonialism, scientific speculation,the psychic and the supernatural, and working class reading.
This book offers a much-needed study of the Victorian novel's role in representing and shaping the service sector's emergence. Arguing that prior accounts of the novel's relation to the rise of finance have missed the emergence of a wider service sector, it traces the effects of service work's many forms and class positions in the Victorian novel.
Nineteenth-century men of science aligned scientific practice with moral excellence as part of an endeavor to secure cultural authority for their discipline. Anne DeWitt examines how novelists from Elizabeth Gaskell to H. G. Wells responded to this alignment. Revising the widespread assumption that Victorian science and literature were part of one culture, she argues that the professionalization of science prompted novelists to deny that science offered widely accessible moral benefits. Instead, they represented the narrow aspirations of the professional as morally detrimental while they asserted that moral concerns were the novel's own domain of professional expertise. This book draws on works of natural theology, popular lectures, and debates from the pages of periodicals to delineate changes in the status of science and to show how both familiar and neglected works of Victorian fiction sought to redefine the relationship between science and the novel.
