Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Melodramatic Imperial Writing
From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes
By Neil Hultgren

Melodrama is often seen as a blunt aesthetic tool tainted by its reliance on improbable situations, moral binaries, and overwhelming emotion, features that made it a likely ingredient of British imperial propaganda during the late nineteenth century. Yet, through its impact on many late-Victorian genres outside of the theater, melodrama developed a complicated relationship with British imperial discourse.Melodramatic

Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century
Abstracting Economics
Edited by Daniel Bivona and Marlene Tromp

Grounded in literary studies and spanning the Americas, India, England, and Scotland, this book explores the relationship between economic concepts and culture in the period, focusing on how economic tropes were abstracted into other discourses in fields as diverse as evolutionary science, business, and literary narrative.

Textile Orientalisms
Cashmere and Paisley Shawls in British Literature and Culture
By Suchitra Choudhury

Considering popular literary images of Indian and Paisley shawls as markers of fashion, class, gender, and race during the long nineteenth century, this book shows how Indian imports and influences shaped wider discussions of British literature, art, politics, and empire.

Indian Angles
English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore
By Mary Ellis Gibson

Indian Angles is a new historical approach to Indian English literature. It shows that poetry, not fiction, was the dominant literary genre of Indian writing in English until 1860 and re-creates the historical webs of affiliation and resistance that writers in colonial India—writers of British, Indian, and mixed ethnicities—experienced.

The Wake of Wellington
Englishness in 1852
By Peter W. Sinnema

Soldier, hero, and politician, the Duke of Wellington is one of the best-known figures of nineteenth-century England. From his victory at Waterloo over Napoleon in 1815, he rose to become prime minister of his country. But Peter Sinnema finds equal fascination in Victorian England’s response to the duke’s death.

Charity and Condescension
Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy
By Daniel Siegel

Charity and Condescension explores how condescension, a traditional English virtue, went sour in the nineteenth century, and considers how the failure of condescension influenced Victorian efforts to reform philanthropy and to construct new narrative models of social conciliation.

Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing
The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875
By Lorraine Janzen Kooistra

In Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing eminent Rossetti scholar Lorraine Janzen Kooistra demonstrates the cultural centrality of a neglected artifact: the Victorian illustrated gift book. Turning a critical lens on “drawing-room books” as both material objects and historical events, Kooistra reveals how the gift book’s visual/verbal form mediated “high” and popular art as well as book and periodical publication.A

The Moxon Tennyson
A Landmark in Victorian Illustration
By Simon Cooke

Cooke’s analysis of this milestone Victorian publication reveals the fluctuating harmony and dissonance between Tennyson’s poems and their illustrations, the technical challenges and occupations involved in its manufacture, its readers’ contemporary reception, and its subsequent influence as a variously revered and reviled publication.

Michael Field
Decadent Moderns
Edited by Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo

As “Michael Field,” Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper conversed with fin-de-siècle aesthetic movements and twentieth-century modernism, articulated ideas associated with the New Woman, and expressed queer desire. Essays address Michael Field’s engagements with a range of cultural touchstones, highlighting their work’s radicalism and relevance.

Collaborative Dickens
Authorship and Victorian Christmas Periodicals
By Melisa Klimaszewski

In Collaborative Dickens, Melisa Klimaszewski undertakes the first comprehensive study of Dickens’s Christmas numbers. She argues for a revised understanding of Dickens as an editor who, rather than ceaselessly bullying his contributors, sometimes accommodated contrary views and depended upon multivocal narratives for his own success.

Transported to Botany Bay
Class, National Identity, and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict
By Dorice Williams Elliott

In analyzing depictions of Australian convicts in novels, broadsides, and first-person accounts, Dorice Williams Elliott demonstrates how Britain linked class, race, and national identity at a key historical moment when it was still negotiating its relationship with its empire.

The Plot Thickens
Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier
By Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge

In the early 1800s, books were largely unillustrated. By the 1830s and 1840s, however, innovations in wood- and steel-engraving techniques changed how Victorian readers consumed and conceptualized fiction. A new type of novel was born, often published in serial form, one that melded text and image as partners in meaning-making.These

Drawing on the Victorians
The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts
Edited by Anna Maria Jones and Rebecca N. Mitchell
· Afterword by Kate Flint

Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in literacy across social classes. New printing technologies facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images—illustrated books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera—to a mass readership. This Victorian visual turn prefigured the present-day impact of the Internet on how images are produced and shared, both driving and reflecting the visual culture of its time.From

Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century
Abstracting Economics
Edited by Daniel Bivona and Marlene Tromp

Grounded in literary studies and spanning the Americas, India, England, and Scotland, this book explores the relationship between economic concepts and culture in the period, focusing on how economic tropes were abstracted into other discourses in fields as diverse as evolutionary science, business, and literary narrative.

Reading for Health
Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel
By Erika Wright

In Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Erika Wright argues that the emphasis in Victorian Studies on disease as the primary source of narrative conflict that must be resolved has obscured the complex reading practices that emerge around the concept of health.

The Victorian Novel of Adulthood
Plot and Purgatory in Fictions of Maturity
By Rebecca Rainof

In The Victorian Novel of Adulthood, Rebecca Rainof confronts the conventional deference accorded the bildungsroman as the ultimate plot model and quintessential expression of Victorian nation building. The novel of maturity, she contends, is no less important to our understanding of narrative, Victorian culture, and the possibilities of fiction.Reading

Forget Me Not
The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835
By Katherine D. Harris

Katherine D. Harris assesses the phenomenal rise of the literary annual and its origins in English, German, and French literary forms as well as its social influence on women, its redefinition of the feminine, and its effects on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century print culture.