Books in the Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture series

This book offers new perspectives on the concept of habit in the nineteenth-century novel, delineating the complex, changing significance of the term and exploring the ways in which its meanings play out in a range of narratives, from Dickens to James.

Aristocratic women flourished in the Victorian literary world, their combination of class privilege and gendered exclusion generating distinctively socialized modes of participation in cultural and political activity. Their writing offers an important trope through which to consider the nature of political, private and public spheres.

The turbulent period from the Boer War to the introduction of the Aliens Act was marked by contradictory imaginings of 'the Jew' - pauper/capitalist, separatist/imposter, ideal colonizer/undesirable immigrant, familiar/alien. This new collection considers the wider colonial context in which these ambivalent attitudes to Jews were produced.

In this fascinating book, Reid examines Robert Louis Stevenson's writings in the context of late-Victorian evolutionist thought, arguing that an interest in 'primitive' life is at the heart of his work.

This book re-examines cultural, social, geographical and philosophical representations of Victorian London by looking at the transformations in urban life produced by the rise and development of urban mass-transport.

Colligan argues that Nineteenth-century obscenity was caught up in the global cultural traffic of print technology, international trade and exoticism. She reveals that obscenity intersected majority and minority culture, searched out new print and visual media, and built commercial and fantasmatic global networks for its continuation and survival.

This book provides insight into how musical performances contributed to emerging ideas about class and national identity. Offering a fresh reading of bestselling fictional works, drawing upon crowd theory, climate theory, ethnology, science, music reviews and books by musicians to demonstrate how these discourses were mutually constitutive.

An original and energetic examination of the relationship between theology, faith, religious history and national politics in the works of Oscar Wilde, which focuses in particular on his life-long attraction to Catholicism.

Although subject to novelist's ambivalent, even satirical, representations, missionary aesthetes nevertheless constituted an influential social network, imbuing fin-de-siecle artistic communities with political purpose and political lobbies with aesthetic sensibility.

This study explores how poets who espoused republican political ideals sought to embody and advance those principles in their verse.

Encounters in the Victorian Periodical Press focuses on the unique characteristic of the Victorian periodical press - its development of encounters between and among readers, editors, and authors.

This innovative book draws together literature, law and economic and social history to investigate the meanings and uses of legitimacy in nineteenth-century Britain. This broad range of essays highlights the ways in which contested narratives and interested performances shaped the idea of legitimate authority during this period.

As the nineteenth-century drew to a close, women became more numerous and prominent in British journalism. This book offers a fascinating introduction to the work lives of twelve such journalists, and each essay examines the career, writing and strategic choices of women battling against the odds to secure recognition in a male-dominated society.

This innovative study shows that nineteenth-century texts gave domesticity not just a spatial but also a temporal dimension. Novels by Dickens and Gaskell, as well as periodicals, cookery books and albums, all showed domesticity as a process.

Transport in British Fiction is the first essay collection devoted to transport and its various types horse, train, tram, cab, omnibus, bicycle, ship, car, air and space as represented in British fiction across a century of unprecedented technological change that was as destabilizing as it was progressive.

This book takes a fresh look at childhood in Dickens' works and in Victorian science and culture more generally. It offers a new way of understanding Dickens' interest in childhood by showing how his fascination with new scientific ideas about childhood and practices of scientific inquiry shaped his narrative techniques and aesthetic imagination.

As the nineteenth-century drew to a close, women became more numerous and prominent in British journalism. This book offers a fascinating introduction to the work lives of twelve such journalists, and each essay examines the career, writing and strategic choices of women battling against the odds to secure recognition in a male-dominated society.

This innovative book draws together literature, law and economic and social history to investigate the meanings and uses of legitimacy in nineteenth-century Britain. This broad range of essays highlights the ways in which contested narratives and interested performances shaped the idea of legitimate authority during this period.

Reflecting the current critical drive to reconcile formalist and historicist approaches to literature, it uses close readings to trace the complex interactions between memory as a theme and the (often-memorable) formal traits - such as brevity, stanzaic structure, and sonic repetition - that appear in the lyrics examined.

This book explores the intersections of gender with class and race in the construction of national and imperial ideologies and their fluid transformation from the Romantic to the Victorian period and beyond, exposing how these cultural constructions are deeply entangled with the family metaphor.

This book is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores the variety ofways in which the interface between understanding the figure of Christ, theplace of the cross, and the contours of lived experience, was articulated throughthe long nineteenth century.

This book explains why narrating the recent past is always challenging, and shows how it was particularly fraught in the nineteenth century. This book brings together Victorian histories and novels to show how these parallel genres responded to the challenges of contemporary history writing in divergent ways.

This book explores the intersections of gender with class and race in the construction of national and imperial ideologies and their fluid transformation from the Romantic to the Victorian period and beyond, exposing how these cultural constructions are deeply entangled with the family metaphor.

It is during the nineteenth-century, the age of machinery, that we begin to witness a sustained exploration of the literal and discursive entanglements of minds, bodies, machines. This book explores the impact of technology upon conceptions of language, consciousness, human cognition, and the boundaries between materialist and esoteric sciences.

By 1840, the epistolary novel was dead. Letters in Victorian fiction, however, were unmistakably alive. Postal Plots explores how Victorian postal reforms unleashed a new and sometimes unruly population into the Victorian literary marketplace where they threatened the definition and development of the Victorian literary professional.

Victorian Time examines how literature of the era registers the psychological impact of the onset of a modern, industrialized experience of time as time-saving technologies, such as steam-powered machinery, aimed at making economic life more efficient, signalling the dawn of a new age of accelerated time.

The Irish New Woman explores the textual and ideological connections between feminist, nationalist and anti-imperialist writing and political activism at the fin de siecle . This is the first study which foregrounds the Irish and New Woman contexts, effecting a paradigm shift in the critical reception of fin de siecle writers and their work.

The 'invisible hand', Adam Smith's metaphor for the morality of capitalism, is explored in this text as being far more subtle and intricate than is usually understood, with many British realist fiction writers (Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot) having absorbed his model of ironic causality in complex societies and turned it to their own purposes.

What makes us human? Where is the limit between human and animal? These are questions that haunt post-Darwinian literature. Covering fiction from Kipling to Kafka, this study offers a historically embedded analysis of anthropological anxiety in the period between the publication of the Origin of Species and the beginning of the Second World War.