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

A study exploring the prevalence of bigamy as a popular plot in Victorian fiction that upends familiar categories and revises our sense of the period's social and narrative conventions. It features the innovative use of periodical archives, an exhaustive appendix, and detailed close readings of familiar and unfamiliar novels.

Featuring a wide range of images, from paintings displayed at Royal Academy exhibitions and in the Houses of Parliament to wood engravings in Punch and the Illustrated London News, this study offers new perspectives on the connections between Victorian art and politics by examining visualizations of franchise reform.

A surprising number of Victorian scientists wrote poetry. Many came to science as children through such games as the spinning-top, soap-bubbles and mathematical puzzles, and this playfulness carried through to both their professional work and writing of lyrical and satirical verse. This is the first study of an oddly neglected body of work that offers a unique record of the nature and cultures of Victorian science. Such figures as the physicist James Clerk Maxwell toy with ideas of nonsense, as through their poetry they strive to delineate the boundaries of the new professional science and discover the nature of scientific creativity. Also considering Edward Lear, Daniel Brown finds the Victorian renaissances in research science and nonsense literature to be curiously interrelated. Whereas science and literature studies have mostly focused upon canonical literary figures, this original and important book conversely explores the uses literature was put to by eminent Victorian scientists.

A study of Oscar Wilde's Hellenism and the influence it had on his life and works. It offers new perspectives on The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest and delivers an insight into the source of Wilde's inspirations and the intellectual currents that shaped him.

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 book analyses works by Jane Austen, W. M. Thackeray, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, as well as extensive material from nineteenth-century dance manuals, to show how dance provided a vehicle through which writers could convey social commentary and cultural critique on issues such as gender, social mobility, and nationalism.

This is a study of Victorian middle-class fatherhood from the fathers' own perspective. It aims to dismantle the classic stereotype of the nineteenth-century paterfamilias by focusing on the lives of influential public men, ranging from novelists to politicians, scientists and leading churchmen.

Richard Salmon provides an original account of the formation of the literary profession during the late Romantic and early Victorian periods. Focusing on the representation of authors in narrative and iconographic texts, including novels, biographies, sketches and portrait galleries, Salmon traces the emergence of authorship as a new form of professional identity from the 1820s to the 1850s. Many first-generation Victorian writers, including Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Martineau and Barrett-Browning, contributed to contemporary debates on the 'Dignity of Literature', professional heroism, and the cultural visibility of the 'man of letters'. This study combines a broad mapping of the early Victorian literary field with detailed readings of major texts. The book argues that the key model of professional development within this period is embodied in the narrative form of literary apprenticeship, which inspired such celebrated works as David Copperfield and Aurora Leigh, and that its formative process is the 'disenchantment of the author'.

The radical press of the Victorian era fostered daring literary experiments that helped shape mainstream literature. This book adds significantly to the study of Victorian literary culture by exploring the interplay between canonical social problem novels and journalism and fiction appearing in the periodical press associated with working-class protest.

In this fascinating, full-length study surveying the diverse ways in which a living was made from death, Claire Wood examines Dickens's creative works, including The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, within the context of his attitude towards the Victorian commodification of death.

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.

How did Victorian novelists including Eliot, Hardy and Wells respond to contemporary men of science who aligned scientific practice with moral excellence in an endeavor to secure cultural authority for their discipline? Anne DeWitt argues that novelists came to reject this alignment, denying that science held widely accessible moral benefits.

An innovative and interdisciplinary study of the Victorian novel's relationship to visual art, showing how major authors including Dickens, Thackeray, Collins and Hardy borrowed from debates about museums, exhibitions, and the art market, as they tried to reach a new readership with new kinds of novels.

Will Abberley explores how Victorian fiction and science imagined the evolution of language, providing a new, historical angle on current debates about language evolution and the language of science. Abberley offers fresh perspectives on authors including Thomas Hardy and H. G. Wells, and genres including utopian, historical and science fiction.

Unlike other Victorian novelists George Eliot rarely incorporated stock market speculation and fraud into her plots, but meditations on money, finance and economics, in relation both to individual ethics and to wider social implications, infuse her novels. This volume examines Eliot's understanding of money and economics, its bearing on her moral and political thought, and the ways in which she incorporated that thought into her novels. It offers a detailed account of Eliot's intellectual engagements with political economy, utilitarianism, and the new liberalism of the 1870s, and also her practical dealings with money through her management of household and business finances and, in later years, her considerable investments in stocks and shares. In a wider context, it presents a detailed study of the ethics of economics in nineteenth-century England, tracing the often uncomfortable relationship between morality and economic utility experienced by intellectuals of the period.

Bradley Deane explores popular literature of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras to reveal how imperial politics reshaped ideals of manliness. Deane's analysis of texts, by writers including Kipling, Conrad and Conan Doyle, also reveals how these new ideals reinforced and propagated the politics of the New Imperialism.

This is the first collection of essays to assess the dynamic interplay between evolution and Victorian culture, mapping new relationships between the arts and sciences. Interdisciplinary and broad-ranging, it explores the relationship of evolution to painting, sculpture, dance, music, fiction, poetry, cinema, architecture, theatre, photography, museums, exhibitions and popular culture.

The Victorians first articulated key questions about sustainability and global eco-catastrophe that are now staples of our cultural discourse. Allen MacDuffie explores the way in which the imaginative literature of the nineteenth century sought to address these emerging ecological concerns and helped in the creation of society's environmental consciousness.

A study of the occult in the popular fiction of the late Victorian period, exploring not only the immense appeal, at that time, of accounts of the paranormal, but also the ways in which ideas of the paranormal seeped into perceptions of authorship and creativity.

This book sets out to correct received accounts of the emergence of art history as a masculine field. It investigates the importance of female writers from Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake and George Eliot to Alice Meynell, Vernon Lee and Michael Field in developing a discourse of art notable for its complexity and cultural power, its increasing professionalism and reach, and its integration with other discourses of modernity. Proposing a more flexible and inclusive model of what constitutes art historical writing, including fiction, poetry and travel literature, this book offers a radically revisionist account of the genealogy of a discipline and a profession. It shows how women experienced forms of professional exclusion that, whilst detrimental to their careers, could be aesthetically formative; how working from the margins of established institutional structures gave women the freedom to be audaciously experimental in their writing about art in ways that resonate with modern readers.

Deborah Lutz investigates the high value the Victorians placed on the artefacts and personal effects of the dead. By close study of works by Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Thomas Hardy, Lutz explores the ways these objects were used in creative narratives for emotional effect.

Nicholas Daly offers a lively and provocative account of the transformation of culture by the population explosion of the nineteenth century. Finding examples in everything from ghost stories to opera to fashion, Daly shows how narratives and images of crowded city life circulated among Paris, London and New York.

The hands of colonized subjects were vital sites of fascination and interpretation in late-Victorian imperial narratives. The book considers accounts of fingerprinting, amputation, disease, manual labor, and mummification as central examples of the racial significance assigned to hands around the fin de siecle.

This fascinating study uncovers the rich variety of exploration texts flourishing before the Victorian equation of discovery with disaster: from the manuscript culture of secretive corporations like the Hudson's Bay Company, to the Admiralty and its illustrated books of naval science, to the Victorian popular exhibits of disaster relics.

An original and wide-ranging study that examines the convergence of evolutionary theory, educational reform, and Victorian children's literature. It includes discussions of evolutionary ideas underpinning the work of Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, and Frances Hodgson Burnett.

This fascinating study explores the ways in which fin-de-siecle periodicals portrayed science, both imaginatively and intellectually. It shows how general interest magazines and those who wrote for them, particularly H. G. Wells, contributed to the birth of a new genre: science fiction.

This is the first collection of essays to assess the dynamic interplay between evolution and Victorian culture, mapping new relationships between the arts and sciences. Interdisciplinary and broad-ranging, it explores the relationship of evolution to painting, sculpture, dance, music, fiction, poetry, cinema, architecture, theatre, photography, museums, exhibitions and popular culture.

This nuanced yet accessible study is the first to examine the range of religious experience imagined in Hopkins' writing. By exploring the shifting way in which Hopkins imagines religious belief in individual history, Martin Dubois contests established views of his poetry as a unified project.

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain is an innovative study of the stylistic tics of canonical novelists including Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. Jonathan Farina shows how ordinary locutions such as 'a decided turn', 'as if' and 'that sort of thing' condense nineteenth-century manners, aesthetics and assumptions about what counts as knowledge.

Heather Tilley examines the huge shifts that took place in the experience and conceptualisation of blindness during the nineteenth century. Considering the ways in which visually-impaired people used texts to shape their own identities, she argues that blindness was also a means by which writers reflected on crafting literary form.