Books in the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture series

Provides an reading of Kipling's fiction using the feminist psychoanalytic methodology of Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous, focusing particularly on ideas of the abjected maternal feminine. This book examines Kipling's ambivalent relationship to the India of his childhood and the 'loss' of his mother figures.

Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin explores the ways in which the figure of the literary orphan can be used to illuminate our understanding of the culture and mores of the long nineteenth century, especially those relating to family and kinship.

A scholarly monograph devoted to Jane Morris, an icon of Victorian art whose face continues to grace a range of Pre-Raphaelite merchandise Described by Henry James as a 'dark, silent, medieval woman', Jane Burden Morris has tended to remain a rather one-dimensional figure in subsequent accounts. This book, however, challenges the stereotype of Jane Morris as silent model, reclusive invalid, and unfaithful wife. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as the biographical and literary tradition surrounding William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the book argues that Jane Morris is a figure who complicates current understandings of Victorian female subjectivity because she does not fit neatly into Victorian categories of feminine identity. She was a working-class woman who married into middle-class affluence, an artist's model who became an accomplished embroiderer and designer, and an apparently reclusive, silent invalid who was the lover of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Wilfred Scawen Blunt. Jane Morris and the Burden of History particularly focuses on textual representations - in letters, diaries, memoirs and novels - from the Victorian period onwards, in order to investigate the cultural transmission and resilience of the stereotype of Jane Morris. Drawing on recent reconceptualisations of gender, auto/biography, and afterlives, this book urges readers to think differently - about an extraordinary woman and about life-writing in the Victorian period. Key Features: First scholarly study of Jane Morris, which seeks to challenge the stereotype surrounding her as melancholy invalid and Pre-Raphaelite femme fatale Innovative case study of the role of class, gender and sexuality in the formation of Victorian feminine subjectivity Contribution to emerging field of new biography and Victorian afterlives through the inclusion and examination of a wide variety of texts which construct the self Original exploration of feminine creative agency that challenges conventional understandings of masculine artistic autonomy in the Victorian period

Dickson identifies the nineteenth century as the beginning of the large-scale absorption of the Arabian Nights into British literature and culture.

Crossing borders, political divides and genres, this book examines the intersections among literary works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Shelley and Wilkie Collins, journalism, parliamentary records and pamphlets, to establish Britain's imaginative investment in the seismic geopolitical realignment of Italian unification.

This book examines anachronisms in realist writing from the colonial periphery to redefine British realism and rethink the politics of institutions.

Self-Harm in New Woman Writing offers a trans-disciplinary study of Victorian literature, culture and medicine through engagement with the recurrent trope of self-harm in writing by and about the British New Woman.

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality.

This book analyses how Victorian novels and plays used the actress, a significant figure for the relationship between women and the public sphere, to define their own place within and among genres and in relation to audiences.

Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture' assesses the unexplored links between Victorian material culture and political theory.

This book reappraises Dickens's Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and his imaginative engagement with its principal protagonist.

Investigates the latent and manifest traces of the East in Pre-Raphaelite literature and culture.

Examines cultural representations of women's experience of the railway in a period of heightened mobility Women's experiences of locomotion during a period of increased physical mobility and urbanisation are explored in this monograph. The 5 chapters analyse Victorian and early Modernist texts which concentrate on women in transit by train, including Wilkie Collins's No Name, George Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton and The Wings of the Dove, and stories by Rhoda Broughton, Margaret Oliphant, Charles Dickens and Katherine Mansfield. They highlight the tension between women's boundless physical, emotional, and sexual aspiration - often depicted as closely related to the freedom and speed of train travel - and Victorian gender ideology which constructed the spaces of the railway as geographies of fear or manipulation. Key features: The first full-length examination of texts by and about women which explore the railway as a gendered space within a British and European context Explores a variety of cultural discourses which deal with women and the railway: fiction, poetry, news stories and commentaries, essays, paintings, and philosophical writings Proposes a reconceptualization of the public/private binary

Explores how Walter Pater and his contemporary aesthetes were influenced by modern philosophies Repositioning Walter Pater at the philosophical nexus of Aestheticism, this study presents the first discussion of how Pater redefines Romantic Individualism through his engagements with modern philosophical discourses and in the context of emerging modernity in Britain. It also considers the dynamics between form and thought at the fin de sicle, contextualizing its comments in terms of Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee and others, to offer a fully integrated account of the intellectual cultures and currents in this period. Key Features:Boldly reassesses Pater's intellectual significance, arguing that he self-consciously poised on the cusp between late-Victorian Romanticism and ModernismImaginatively combines close readings with cultural and intellectual history and biography to reconsider individualism and philosophical thought in the Aesthetic 'Movement'Provides the most substantial scholarly engagement with Pater's unpublished manuscripts (held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

Examines the Reading Room of the British Museum as a space of imaginative and historically generative potential in relation to the emergence of modern women writers in Victorian and early twentieth-century London Drawing on archival materials around this national library reading room, Roomscape is the first study that integrates documentary, theoretical, historical, and literary sources to examine the significance of this public interior space for women writers and their treatment of reading and writing spaces in literary texts. This book challenges an assessment of the Reading Room of the British Museum as a bastion of class and gender privilege, an image firmly established by Virginia Woolf's 1929 A Room of One's Own and the legions of feminist scholarship that uphold this spatial conceit. Susan David Bernstein argues not only that the British Museum Reading Room facilitated various practices of women's literary traditions, she also questions the overdetermined value of privacy and autonomy in constructions of female authorship, a principle generated from Woolf's feminist manifesto. Rather than viewing reading and writing as solitary, individual events, Roomscape considers the meaning of exteriority and the public and social and gendered dimensions of literary production. In addition to new perspectives on George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and Virginia Woolf, Roomscape offers original research on other novelists, poets, and translators including Amy Levy, Mathilde Blind, Eleanor Marx, Clementina Black, Constance Black Garnett, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). Looking at the Reading Room of the British Museum as a networking site for a variety of readers, this study examines political radicals and women activists who found a transnational community in this London public space. An appendix of notable readers lists details of more than 200 women readers who registered for admission to the Reading Room of the British Museum from the middle of the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century.

Explores the lasting cultural and political impact of the events of this remarkable yearOscar Wilde's libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry and its disastrous repercussions dominated British newspapers during the spring of 1895, but as this innovative study reveals, the Wilde scandal was by no means the only event to capture the public's imagination that year. Freak weather, a flu epidemic, a General Election, industrial unrest, 'sex novels' and New Women, trials of murderers and fraudsters, accidents, anarchists, bombers, balloonists and bicyclists were all topics of interest and alarm. Had Jack the Ripper returned? Did the Prime Minister have a dreadful secret? Were Aubrey Beardsley's drawings corrupting the nation's morals? Were overpaid foreign players corrupting English football? Could cricket save a degenerate nation from moral ruin?Drawing on strikingly diverse primary sources, Nicholas Freeman examines the recurrent preoccupations of a turbulent year, showing how 1890s' Britain is at once far removed from our own day and yet strangely familiar.

The great polymath William Morris and his contemporaries and followers - from H. Rider Haggard to H. G. Wells - are the focus of this study. Anna Vaninskaya draws widely on primary sources to explore the many ways Victorians and Edwardians talked about community and modernity.

This book is devoted to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's complex relationship with the three main Victorian literary genres (the Gothic, the Detective and the Realist novel) using Braddon's bestselling sensation fiction, Lady Audley's Secret, as a starting point

By connecting Fenian and anarchist violence found in popular fiction from the 1880s to the early 1900s with the avant-garde writing of British modernism, Deaglan Donghaile demonstrates that Victorian popular fiction and modernism were directly influenced by the explosive shocks of late nineteenth-century terrorism. For the first time, late-Victorian 'dynamite novels', radical journalism and modernist writing are brought together in provocative readings of Henry James, R L Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and Wyndham Lewis. Key Features*Extensive original archival research from libraries in the UK, Ireland and the US*The first book to examine types of political and literary disruption*Reads Henry James, R L Stevenson and Joseph Conrad in new contexts *Detailed discussion of Wyndham Lewis's avant-garde Vorticist journal BLAST in chapter 4

Examines the Spiritualist movement's role in disseminating eugenic and hard hereditarian thought

The Victorian Male Body' examines some of the main expressions and practices of Victorian masculinity and its embodied physicality.

What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? 'Artful Experiments' seeks to approach the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge.

This study explores lyric poetry's response to a crisis of relevance in Victorian Modernity, offering an analysis of literature usually elided by studies of the modern formation of the genre and uncovering previously unrecognized discourses within it.