Books in the Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture series

This book explores how Victorian women readers strategically identified with literature to defy stereotypes and inspire their action and creativity. Engaging with nineteenth-century English literature and culture, the book engages with theories and histories of reading that appeal to literary scholars and educators.

This book accounts for the resurgence of Gothic, and its immense popularity, during the British fin de siecle. Kelly Hurley explores a key scenario that haunts the genre - the loss of a unified and stable human identity - and reveals the links between the Gothic body and nineteenth-century scientific and social theories.

All of London exploded on the night of May 18, 1900, in the biggest West End party ever seen. The mix of media manipulation, patriotism, and class, race, and gender politics that produced the 'spontaneous' festivities of Mafeking Night begins this analysis of the cultural politics of late-Victorian imperialism. Paula M. Krebs examines 'the last of the gentlemen's wars' - the Boer War of 1899-1902 - and the struggles to maintain an imperialist hegemony in a twentieth-century world, through the war writings of Arthur Conan Doyle, Olive Schreiner, H. Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling, as well as contemporary journalism, propaganda, and other forms of public discourse. Her feminist analysis of such matters as the sexual honor of the British soldier at war, the deaths of thousands of women and children in 'concentration camps', and new concepts of race in South Africa marks this book as a significant contribution to British imperial studies.

Linda M. Austin explores the ways in which scientific questions about the relation between human beings and automata, raised by the 'new psychology' of the late nineteenth century, forced the re-examination of creativity in literature, photography, ballet, and high-level mental activities.

This book will interest anyone who is curious about how Shakespeare became the presiding deity of English literature. It describes the Victorians' quasi-Biblical culture surrounding Shakespeare's work and discusses why Victorian devotion had an enduring impact upon English studies in the Western world.

Studies of the literature of the British imperialism too often focus on India to the exclusion of other areas. This book redresses the balance by demonstrating how integral China and the Chinese were to the British imagination and to globalization, literature, aesthetics and popular culture from the 1840s to 1911.

Lucy Hartley identifies a new language for speaking about beauty, which begins to be articulated from the 1830s in a climate of political reform and becomes linked to ideals of equality, liberty and individuality. Including numerous illustrations, the volume offers a fresh interdisciplinary understanding of art's relation to its public.

Examining works by writers including Wordsworth, Dickens and Conan Doyle, as well as spectacles such as the Great Exhibition, Tanya Agathocleous shows how London was conceived as a cosmopolis - an image of the world that allowed writers and readers to come to grips with the advent of globalization.

Carolyn Dever discusses the apparent paradox that, while Victorian culture idealized the figure of the mother, many popular novels of the period feature mothers who are dead or absent. She goes on to consider the relationship of the dead mother to Victorian theories of origin and Freudian psychoanalysis.

This is a 2001 study of the emergence of physiognomy as a form of popular science.

This 1999 book explores the work of Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Hardy in the context of their concern with questions of human agency and will, and discusses more general questions of poetics. His book makes a major contribution to the current renewal of interest in formalist readings of poetry.

At the time of the Irish famine, novels by Dickens and Gaskell, and commentaries on the famine, introduced a new theory of individual expression, which gradually replaced the older ideas of political economy, and became the foundation for modern concepts of capitalism based on the desires of the individual consumer.

Chakravarty explores representations of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 in British popular fiction and historiography. He draws on a range of primary sources including diaries, autobiographies and state papers. The book has a broad interdisciplinary base and will appeal to scholars of English literature, modern Indian history and cultural studies.

This collection of essays addresses important issues in the history of the book, and considers aspects of the production, circulation, and consumption of printed texts. Using different methodological approaches, the essays examine market trends, modes of publication, and the use of pseudonyms by women writers.

This is a book about the relationship between the development of forensic science in the nineteenth century and the new literary genre of detective fiction in Britain and America - from Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens and Hawthorne through Twain and Conan Doyle to Hammett, Chandler and Christie.

This book is about the influence of Byron on later nineteenth-century writers. Using literary-historical methods, the author discusses Byron's influence on six Victorian authors, Carlyle, Emily Bronte, Tennyson, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, and Wilde, and concentrates on issues of class, gender, and sexuality.

Through detailed readings of the fiction of Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens and George Eliot Miriam Bailin explores the cultural and narrative significance of illness in Victorian literature, providing insight into canonical works and approaches to narrative realism.

The parlour was the centre of the Victorian home and, as Thad Logan shows, the place where contemporary conflicts about domesticity and gender relations were played out. In The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study, Logan uses an interdisciplinary approach to describe and analyse the parlour as a significant cultural space.

This is a 2001 study of the intersection of literary culture, the occult and new technology at the fin-de-siecle. Pamela Thurschwell looks at the ways in which psychical research, the scientific study of the occult, is reflected in the writings of such authors as Henry James, George du Maurier and Oscar Wilde, and in the foundations of psychoanalysis.

This 1998 book examines a range of nineteenth-century European accounts from the Pacific, depicting Polynesian responses to imported metropolitan culture, in particular its technologies of writing and print. It focuses on texts by beachcombers and missionaries, and the late Pacific writings of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Charles Dickens was known as 'The Inimitable', not least for his very distinctive way of writing. This collection of essays by leading scholars explores the variety, range and technical skill of Dickens's style, and shows how it is inextricably involved with all kinds of historical, political and ideological concerns.

This collection of essays addresses important issues in the history of the book, and considers aspects of the production, circulation, and consumption of printed texts. Using different methodological approaches, the essays examine market trends, modes of publication, and the use of pseudonyms by women writers.

In this 1997 book, William F. Shuter shows how Walter Pater attempted to rewrite his own literary and cultural past, and how Pater's later work serves, paradoxically, as a necessary introduction to the earlier. This rereading reveals patterns of continuity and anticipation, and sheds light on Pater and his writings.

This collection of essays by scholars in literature, cultural studies, art history, and women's studies goes beyond biography and official history to explore the diverse and sometimes conflicting meanings Queen Victoria held for her subjects around the world, and for those outside her empire.

Pamela Gilbert argues that popular fiction in mid-Victorian Britain was regarded as both feminine and diseased. She discusses, in particular, work by three very popular women novelists of the time - M. E. Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, and 'Ouida' - in the context of their reception by readers and critics.

John Glavin uncovers a richly ambivalent, often unexpectedly hostile, relationship between Dickens and the theatre and theatricality of his own time. Yet he also explores the performative potential in Dickens's fiction, and describes ways to stage that fiction in emotionally powerful, critically acute adaptations.

Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of fictional narratives, to show how domestic work gained social credibility through the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism. Her study questions the stereotypes of Victorian domesticity, and revises our understanding of nineteenth-century domestic ideology.

In Victorian Writing about Risk, first published in 2000, Elaine Freedgood explores the geography of risk produced by a wide spectrum of once-popular literature. The consolations this geography of risk offers are precariously predicated on dominant Victorian definitions of people and places which have assigned identities which allow risk to be located and contained.

This study of narrative technique in Victorian novels shows Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Disraeli, Hardy, Kingsley, Trollope, and Wells negotiating the boundaries of representation to reveal subjects (notably sexuality and social class) which contemporary critics sought to exclude from the realm of the novel.

This book examines actresses on the English stage of the later nineteenth century, and reveals that much of their work is determined by the popularity at the time of images of Classical sculpture. The book looks at many neglected plays and draws on theatrical fictions and visual representations, as well as theatrical productions.