Meter Matters
Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century
Edited by Jason David Hall
Across the nineteenth century, meter mattered—in more ways and to more people than we might well appreciate today. For the period’s poets, metrical matters were a source of inspiration and often vehement debate. And the many readers, teachers, and pupils encountered meter and related topics in both institutional and popular forms.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Victorian Studies · Literature
Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925
By Martin Hipsky
Today’s mass-market romances have their precursors in late Victorian popular novels written by and for women. In Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance Martin Hipsky scrutinizes some of the best-selling British fiction from the period 1885 to 1925, the era when romances, especially those by British women, were sold and read more widely than ever before or since.Recent
Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913
A Critical Anthology
Edited by Mary Ellis Gibson
Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology makes accessible for the first time the entire range of poems written in English on the subcontinent from their beginnings in 1780 to the watershed moment in 1913 when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature.Mary Ellis Gibson establishes accurate texts for such well-known poets as Toru Dutt and the early nineteenth-century poet Kasiprasad Ghosh.
Poetry Anthology · British Literature · 19th century · India · Literature · Victorian Studies
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.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literary Criticism, Asia · Literary Criticism, Poetry · India · Literature · Victorian Studies
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
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Victorian Studies · Book and Periodical Studies
Amy Levy
Critical Essays
Edited by Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman
Amy Levy has risen to prominence in recent years as one of the most innovative and perplexing writers of her generation. Embraced by feminist scholars for her radical experimentation with queer poetic voice and her witty journalistic pieces on female independence, she remains controversial for her representations of London Jewry that draw unmistakably on contemporary antisemitic discourse.Amy
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Gender Studies · Jewish Studies · Victorian Studies · Literature
X Marks the Spot
Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895
By Megan A. Norcia
During the nineteenth century, geography primers shaped the worldviews of Britain’s ruling classes and laid the foundation for an increasingly globalized world. Written by middle-class women who mapped the world that they had neither funds nor freedom to traverse, the primers employed rhetorical tropes such as the Family of Man or discussions of food and customs in order to plot other cultures along an imperial hierarchy.Cross-disciplinary
Literary Criticism | Children's & Young Adult · Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · United Kingdom · Literature · Victorian Studies
The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold
By Antony H. Harrison
The career of Matthew Arnold as an eminent poet and the preeminent critic of his generation constitutes a remarkable historical spectacle orchestrated by a host of powerful Victorian cultural institutions.The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold investigates these constructions by situating Arnold’s poetry in a number of contexts that partially shaped it.
Dancing out of Line
Ballrooms, Ballets, and Mobility in Victorian Fiction and Culture
By Molly Engelhardt
Dancing out of Line transports readers back to the 1840s, when the craze for social and stage dancing forced Victorians into a complex relationship with the moving body in its most voluble, volatile form.By
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literary Criticism · Victorian Studies · Literature
Making a Man
Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
By Gwen Hyman
Gruel and truffles, wine and gin, opium and cocaine. Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel addresses the role of food, drink, and drugs in the conspicuously consuming nineteenth century in order to explore the question of what makes a man of a certain class in novels of the period.
Electric Meters
Victorian Physiological Poetics
By Jason R. Rudy
Victorian poetry shocks with the physicality of its formal effects, linking the rhythms of the human body to the natural pulsation of the universe.
Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture
The Making of a Legend
Edited by Joseph Bristow
Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of an immensely influential writer’s reputation from his hectic 1881 American lecture tour to recent Hollywood adaptations of his dramas. Always renowned—if not notorious—for his fashionable persona, Wilde courted celebrity at an early age. Later, he came to prominence as one of the most talented essayists and fiction writers of his time.In
Literary Criticism · Victorian Studies · Literature · Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
A Necessary Luxury
Tea in Victorian England
By Julie E. Fromer
In A Necessary Luxury Julie E. Fromer analyzes tea histories, advertisements, and nine Victorian novels, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Wuthering Heights, and Portrait of a Lady. Fromer demonstrates how tea functions as an arbiter of taste and middle-class respectability.
Social History · British History · Popular Culture · United Kingdom · Victorian Studies · Victorian Era
The Demon and the Damozel
Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
By Suzanne Waldman
Developing a perspective on Victorian culture as the breeding ground for early theories of the unconscious and the divided psyche, The Demon and the Damozel: Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti offers a new reading of these eminent Victorian siblings’ literature and visual arts.Suzanne
Victorian Studies · Art · Poetry · Christina Rossetti · Victorian Era · 19th century
The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XI
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Robert Browning
·
Edited by Michael Bright
In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.Volume XI of The Complete Works of Robert Browning contains two strikingly disparate long poems from the 1870s, Fifine at the Fair and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.
British Literature · Poetry · Victorian Studies · Literature
Heretical Hellenism
Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination
By Shanyn Fiske
Heretical Hellenism examines sources such as theater history and popular journals to uncover the ways women acquired knowledge of Greek literature, history, and philosophy and challenged traditional humanist assumptions about the uniformity of classical knowledge and about women’s place in literary history.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Women’s Studies · 19th century · United Kingdom · Victorian Studies · Victorian Era · Literature
Come Buy, Come Buy
Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing
By Krista Lysack
From the 1860s through the early twentieth century, Great Britain saw the rise of the department store and the institutionalization of a gendered sphere of consumption.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Women’s Studies · Popular Culture · United Kingdom · Victorian Studies
Cleansing the City
Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London
By Michelle Allen
Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian Londonexplores not only the challenges faced by reformers as they strove toclean up an increasingly filthy city but the resistance to their efforts.Beginning in the 1830s, reform-minded citizens, under the banner of sanitaryimprovement, plunged into London’s dark and dirty spaces and returned withthe material they needed to promote public health legislation and magnificentprojects of sanitary engineering.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · History | Europe | Great Britain | Victorian Era · Victorian Studies · United Kingdom
The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror
By Simon Joyce
Simon Joyce examines heritage culture, contemporary politics, and the “neo-Dickensian” novel to offer a more affirmative assessment of the Victorian legacy, one that lets us imagine a model of social interconnection and interdependence that has come under threat in today’s politics and culture.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Victorian Studies · Literature
Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson
Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body
By Oliver S. Buckton
Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body is the first booklengthstudy about the influence of travel on RobertLouis Stevenson’s writings, both fiction and nonfiction.Within
Gender Studies · Victorian Studies · Literary Criticism · Travel
The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XV
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Robert Browning
·
Edited by Allan C. Dooley, David Ewbank, Jack W. Herring, and Paul D. L. Turner
In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.In the 1880s, the aging Browning showed once again the remarkable versatility of his lyric and narrative talents.
Poetry · British Literature · Literature · Victorian Studies
The Cut of His Coat
Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914
By Brent Shannon
The English middle class in the late nineteenth century enjoyed an increase in the availability and variety of material goods. With that, the visual markers of class membership and manly behavior underwent a radical change.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Popular Culture · 19th century · United Kingdom · Victorian Studies
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.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · British History · United Kingdom · Victorian Studies
Inventing Pollution
Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800
By Peter Thorsheim
Britain’s supremacy in the nineteenth century depended in large part on its vast deposits of coal. This coal not only powered steam engines in factories, ships, and railway locomotives but also warmed homes and cooked food. As coal consumption skyrocketed, the air in Britain’s cities and towns became filled with ever-greater and denser clouds of smoke.In
British History · Environmental Policy · Medical | Health Policy · History of Technology · History | Historical Geography · Victorian Studies · United Kingdom
Bleak Houses
Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction
By Lisa Surridge
The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 opened magistrates’ courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings, and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began. But how did popular fiction treat “private” family violence? Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction traces novelists’ engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century.Lisa
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Victorian Studies
Graham R.
Rosamund Marriot Watson, Woman of Letters
By Linda K. Hughes
Rosamund Marriott Watson was a gifted poet, an erudite literary and art critic, and a daring beauty whose life illuminates fin-de-siècle London. In Graham R., Linda K. Hughes traces the poet’s development from accomplished ballads and sonnets, to avant-garde urban impressionism and New Woman poetry, to her anticipation of literary modernism.
Biography, Literary Figures · Biography & Autobiography | Women · 19th century · Literature · Victorian Studies
The Fin-de-Siècle Poem
English Literary Culture and the 1890s
Edited by Joseph Bristow
Featuring innovative research by emergent and established scholars, The Fin-de-Siècle Poem throws new light on the remarkable diversity of poetry produced at the close of the nineteenth century in England. Opening with a detailed preface that explains why literary historians have frequently underrated fin-de-siècle poetry, the collection shows how a strikingly rich body of lyrical and narrative poems anticipated many of the developments traditionally attributed to Modernism.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literary Criticism, Poetry · Literature · Victorian Studies
Pictorial Victorians
The Inscription of Values in Word and Image
By Julia Thomas
The Victorians were image obsessed. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the picture industry. Technological advances enabled the Victorians to adorn with images the pages of their books and the walls of their homes. But this was not a wholly visual culture. Pictorial Victorians focuses on two of the most popular mid-nineteenth-century genres—illustration and narrative painting—that blurred the line between the visual and textual.Illustration
Art History · Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Popular Culture · Victorian Studies
Music Hall and Modernity
The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture
By Barry J. Faulk
The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture. Music Hall and Modernity demonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. These social arbiters were, at the same time, devotees of the spontaneous culture of “the people.”In
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Victorian Studies
Raising the Dust
The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman
By Beth Sutton-Ramspeck
Raising the Dust identifies a heretofore-overlooked literary phenomenon that author Beth Sutton-Ramspeck calls “literary housekeeping.” The three writers she examines rejected turn-of-the-century aestheticism and modernism in favor of a literature that is practical, even ostensibly mundane, designed to “set the human household in order.”To
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literary Criticism, Women Authors · Literature · Victorian Studies
Inaugural Wounds
The Shaping of Desire in Five Nineteenth-Century English Narratives
By Robert E. Lougy
Desire, Jacques Lacan suggests, is a condition or expression of our wounded nature. But because such desire is also unconscious, it can be expressed only indirectly, for what we consciously desire is hardly ever what we really want. Desire makes itself known, but disguises its presence—appearing, for example, in unconscious but repetitive, and sometimes even self-destructive, patterns of behavior.Informed
British Literature · Literary Criticism · Literature · Victorian Studies
Subjects on Display
Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity
By Beth Newman
Subjects on Display explores a recurrent figure at the heart of many nineteenth-century English novels: the retiring, self-effacing woman who is conspicuous for her inconspicuousness. Beth Newman draws upon both psychoanalytic theory and recent work in social history as she argues that this paradoxical figure, who often triumphs over more dazzling, eye-catching rivals, is a response to the forces that made personal display a vexed issue for Victorian women.
Gender Studies · Literature · Victorian Studies · British Literature · Literary Criticism · Psychology · Women’s Studies
Fortune’s Wheel
Dickens and the Iconography of Women’s Time
By Elizabeth A. Campbell
In the first half of the nineteenth century, England became quite literally a world on wheels. The sweeping technological changes wrought by the railways, steam-powered factory engines, and progressively more sophisticated wheeled conveyances of all types produced a corresponding revolution in Victorian iconography: the image of the wheel emerged as a dominant trope for power, modernity, and progress.In
Gender Studies · Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literature · Victorian Studies
Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies
Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market
By Mary Wilson Carpenter
Of the many literary phenomena that sprang up in eighteenth-century England and later became a staple of Victorian culture, one that has received little attention until now is the “Family Bible with Notes.” Published in serial parts to make it affordable, the Family Bible was designed to enhance the family’s status and sense of national and imperial identity.Imperial
British Literature · Literary Criticism · Literature · Victorian Studies
Vernon Lee
Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual
By Christa Zorn
A startlingly original study, Vernon Lee adds new dimensions to the legacy of this woman of letters whose career spans the transition from the late Victorian to the modernist period. Christa Zorn draws on archival materials to discuss Lee’s work in terms of British aestheticism and in the context of the Western European history of ideas.
Gender Studies · Literature · Victorian Studies · British Literature · Literary Criticism · Women’s Studies
Women, Work, and Representation
Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature
By Lynn M. Alexander
In Victorian England, virtually all women were taught to sew; needlework was allied with images of domestic economy and with traditional female roles of wife and mother- with home rather than factory. The professional seamstress, however, labored long hours for very small wages creating gowns for the upper and middle classes.
Literary Criticism, Women · Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Women’s History · Women’s Studies · Literature · Victorian Studies
Signs of Their Times
History, Labor, and the Body in Cobbett, Carlyle, and Disraeli
By John M. Ulrich
From the 1820s through the 1840s, debate raged over what Thomas Carlyle famously termed “the Condition of England Question.” While much of the debate focused on how to remedy the material sufferings of the rural and urban working classes, for three writers in particular—William Cobbett, Thomas Carlyle, and Benjamin Disraeli–the times were marked by an even more pervasive crisis that threatened not only the material lives of workers, but also the very stability of meaning itself.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literature · Victorian Studies
The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XIV
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Robert Browning
·
Edited by John Berkey, Paul Turner, Michael Bright, and David Ewbank
In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.Volume XIV of The Complete Works of Robert Browning records a transition in the poet’s career.
Poetry · British Literature · Literature · Victorian Studies
Dark Smiles
Race and Desire in George Eliot
By Alicia Carroll
Although George Eliot has long been described as “the novelist of the Midlands,” she often brought the outer reaches of the empire home in her work. Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot studies Eliot’s problematic, career-long interest in representing racial and ethnic Otherness.Placing
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literary Criticism, Women Authors · Literature · Victorian Studies · Race and Ethnicity
Christina Rossetti and Illustration
A Publishing History
By Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
Readers do not always take into account how books that combine image and text make their meanings. But for the Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti, such considerations were central.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Illustration - History and Criticism · Victorian Studies · 19th century · United Kingdom
Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time
Edited by Christine L. Krueger
We are a century removed from Queen Victoria’s death, yet the culture that bears her name is alive and well across the globe. Not only is Victorian culture the subject of lively critical debate, but it draws widespread interest from popular audiences and consumers.Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time addresses the theme of the Victorians’ continuing legacy and its effect on our own culture and perception of the world.
Literature · Victorian Studies · British Literature · Literary Criticism
Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs
Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel
By Alisa Clapp-Itnyre
Music was at once one of the most idealized and one of the most contested art forms of the Victorian period. Yet this vitally important nineteenth-century cultural form has been studied by literary critics mainly as a system of thematic motifs. Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs positions music as a charged site of cultural struggle, promoted concurrently as a transcendent corrective to social ills and as a subversive cause of those ills.
British Literature · Literary Criticism · Literature · Victorian Studies
Educating Women
Cultural Conflict and Victorian Literature
By Laura Morgan Green
In 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, no institution of higher education in Britain was open to women. By the end of the century, a quiet revolution had occurred: women had penetrated even the venerable walls of Oxford and Cambridge and could earn degrees at the many new universities founded during Victoria’s reign. During the same period, novelists increasingly put intellectually ambitious heroines students, teachers, and frustrated scholars—at the center of their books.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Women’s Studies · Literature · Victorian Studies
The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XII
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Robert Browning
·
Edited by Rita Patteson and Paul Turner
In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.A single work, the complex Aristophanes’ Apology (1875), comprises the twelfth volume of The Complete Works of Robert Browning.
Poetry · British Literature · Literature · Victorian Studies
The Rescue of Romanticism
Walter Pater and John Ruskin
By Kenneth Daley
Valuable and timely in its long historical and critical perspective on the legacy of romanticism to Victorian art and thought, The Rescue of Romanticism is the first book-length study of the close intellectual relationship between Walter Pater and John Ruskin, the two most important Victorian critics of art.
British Literature · Literary Criticism · Literature · Victorian Studies
