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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This study examines the periodical press in nineteenth-century culture, and considers issues of gender in the development of the press as a powerful political and social medium. The study explores broad questions as they are raised in a range of different kinds of periodicals, from journals to comic magazines.

This book examines the representation of painting, theatre, and music within the work of major nineteenth-century novelists. Examining the aesthetic theory and cultural practice of different arts, Alison Byerly demonstrates the importance of artistic representation to the development of Victorian Realism.

This 2001 book adds an important dimension to the concept of parody as a combative strategy by which sexually marginalized groups undermine the status quo. Dennis Denisoff explores the interactions of late nineteenth and twentieth-century parody and aestheticism with the texts of canonical authors.

In this study Nancy Henry introduces a set of facts that place George Eliot's life and work within the contexts of mid-nineteenth-century British colonialism and imperialism. Henry examines Eliot's roles as an investor in colonial stocks, a parent to emigrant sons and a reader of colonial literature.

Using texts ranging from local newspapers to medical tomes, Sally Shuttleworth explores Victorian constructions of psychology, sexuality, and insanity, and offers a reading of Bronte's fiction informed by a new understanding of the complex, often contradictory, psychological debates of her time.

This volume focuses on muscular Christianity as a violent, sexist, religious philosophy, containing strong ideological links with the work of mainstream Victorian writers. Throughout this book, muscular Christianity is shown to be at the heart of issues of gender, class and national identity in the Victorian age.

For the Victorians, magazines and periodicals played a far greater role than books in shaping their understanding of the new discoveries and theories in science, technology and medicine. This book identifies and analyses the presentation of science in the periodical press in Britain between 1800 and 1900.

Gail Turley Houston examines how the language and imagery of economics are transformed in Gothic fiction, and traces literary and uncanny elements in economic writings of the period. This stimulating interdisciplinary book reveals that the worlds of Victorian economics and Gothic fiction, seemingly separate, actually complemented and enriched each other.

Silver examines the ways nineteenth-century British writers used physical states of the female body - hunger, appetite, fat and slenderness - in the creation of female characters. She discusses a wide range of writers including Charlotte Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll.

Nicola Bown's study reminds us that for the Victorians the fairy symbolized disenchantment with the irresistible forces of progress and modernity. As these forces stripped their world of its wonder, Victorians consoled themselves by dreaming of a place suffused with the enchantment that was disappearing from their own lives.

By charting the key moments in the history of 'cheap' literature, this book casts new light on the many neglected popular genres and texts including the 'pig's meat' anthology, the female-authored didactic tale, and Chartist fiction.

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.

Anna Johnston argues that missionaries occupied ambiguous positions in colonial cultures, caught between imperial and religious interests. She examines texts from Indian and Australian missions to highlight their representation of nineteenth-century evangelical activity in relation to gender, colonialism and race.

Scheinberg examines Anglo-Jewish (Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy) and Christian (Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti) women poets, and argues that there are important connections between the discourses of nineteenth-century poetry, gender and religious identity.

This original study examines how the changing nature of evidence in law and theology shaped literary narrative in the nineteenth century. Jan-Melissa Schramm argues that authors of fiction created a style of literary advocacy which both imitated, and reacted against, the example of their storytelling counterparts of the criminal Bar.

This book was first published in 1999. This collection of essays by leading scholars from Britain, the USA and Canada opens up the limited landscape of Victorian novels by focusing attention on some of the women writers popular in their own time but forgotten or neglected by literary history.

This 1998 study shows that many of Dickens' characters and plots can be traced to the Victorian stage. Exploring accounts of actors, actresses, and popular onstage characters, Deborah Vlock uncovers unexpected sources for some Dickensian characters, and throws new light on the conditions in which Dickens' novels were initially received.

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.

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.

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.

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.