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.

What role do objects play in realist narratives as they move between societies and their different systems of value as commodities, as charms, as gifts, as trophies, or as curses? This book explores how the struggle to represent objects in British colonial realism corresponded with historical struggles over the material world and its significance.

This book offers a new history of the fairy tale, revealing the creative role of periodical publication in shaping this popular genre. Sumpter explores the fairy tale's reinvention for (and by) diverse readerships in unexpected contexts, including debates over evolution, colonialism, socialism, gender and sexuality and decadence.

This book examines the construction of adolescent girlhood across a range of genres in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 explores the aesthetic practices used by Dickens to make the space which we have come to know as the Dickensian City. The city is shown to be an imagined or virtual world but with a serious aim for a serious game: Dickens sets up a workshop for the simulation of real societies and cities.

It argues that readers on both sides of the Atlantic shaped the contours of international 'English' in the 1800s, expressing love for books and authors in a wide range of media and social practices.

This book focuses on the role that the Oxford classical curriculum has had in shaping Oscar Wilde's aestheticism. It also explores Wilde's thoughts on education and considers the significance of male friendship at Oxford, and in Wilde's life and literature.

This volume examines the emergence of modern popular culture between the 1830s and the 1860s, when popular storytelling meant serial storytelling and when new printing techniques and an expanding infrastructure brought serial entertainment to the masses.

Inspired by the work of the radical literary scholar, the late Sally Ledger, this volume provides a commentary on the political traditions that underpin the literature of this complex period, and examines the interpretive methods that are needed to understand them.

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.

A Tale of Two Cities has always been one of Dickens's most popular texts. Using a variety of disciplinary approaches, this new collection of essays examines the origins of Dickens vision of the French Revolution, the literary power of the text itself, and its enduring place in British culture through stage and screen adaptations.

This collection demonstrates how late-Victorian and Edwardian neurology and fiction shared common philosophical concerns and rhetorical strategies. Between 1860 and 1920 witnessed unprecedented interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and artists, finding common ground in the prevailing intellectual climate of biological determinism.

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 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.

This collection will draw attention to new ideas in both Victorian studies and in the emerging area of literature and the environment. Adopting a broad interpretation of the term ¿environment¿ the work aims to draw together new approaches to Victorian texts and cultures that conceptualise and are influenced by environments ranging from rural to urban, British to Antipodean, and from the terrestrial to the aquatic.With the pressures of industrialism and the clustering of workers in urban centres, the Victorians were acutely aware that their environment was changing. Torn between nostalgia for a countryside that was in jeopardy and exhilaration at the rapidity with which their surroundings altered, the literature and culture produced by the Victorians reflects a world undergoing radical change. Colonization and assisted emigration schemes expanded the scope of the environment still further, pushing the boundaries of the ¿home¿ on an unprecedented scale and introducing strange new worlds. These untamed physical environments enabled new freedoms, but also posed challenges that invited attempts to control, taxonomize and harness the natural world. Victorian Environments draws together leading and emerging international scholars for an examination of how various kinds of environments were constructed, redefined, and transformed, in British and colonial texts and cultures, with particular attention to the relationship between Australia and Britain.

This volume examines the anxieties that caused many nineteenth-century writers to insist on literature as a laboured and labouring enterprise. Whereas previous studies have focused on national literatures in isolation, this volume demonstrates the two-way traffic between British and French conceptions of literary labour.

It provides an account of poetry's intervention into four different sites where liberalism has a stake: the self, the university, married life and the nation state and it seeks to assert the peculiar capacity of poetry to articulate liberal concerns, proposing poetic language as a means of liberal enquiry.

This book is about selected Victorian texts and authors that in many cases have never before been subject to sustained scholarly attention.

This book provides the first thematic survey and analysis of nineteenth-century writing that imagined outcomes that history might have produced. Narratives of possible worlds and scenariosΓÇöreferred to here as ΓÇ£alternate historiesΓÇ¥ΓÇöproliferated during the nineteenth century and clustered around pressing themes and emergent disciplines of knowledge. This study examines accounts of undefeated Napoleons after Waterloo, alternative genealogies of western civilization from antiquity to the (nineteenth-century) present day, the imagination of variant histories on other worlds, lost-world fictions that ΓÇ£discoveredΓÇ¥ improved relations between men and women, and the use of alternate history in America to reconceive the relationship between the New World and the Old. The ΓÇ£untimelyΓÇ¥ imagination of other histories interrogated the impact of new techniques of knowledge on the nature of history itself. This book sheds light on the history of speculative thought, and the relationship between literature and the history of ideas in the nineteenth century.

This is the first collection of critical essays that explores Oscar Wilde¿s interest in children¿s culture, whether in relation to his famous fairy stories, his life as a caring father to two small boys, his place as a defender of children¿s rights within the prison system, his fascination with youthful beauty, and his theological contemplation of what it means to be a child in the eyes of God. The collection also examines the ways in which Wilde¿s works¿not just his fairy stories¿have been adapted for young audiences.

Fictions of British Decadence is a fresh account of the emergence, development and legacy of fiction written in the era of Oscar Wilde. It examines a broad range of texts by a diverse array of Decadent writers, from familiar figures such as Ernest Dowson and John Davidson to lesser-known innovators such as Arthur Machen and M.P. Shiel.

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.

An ambitious weave of ideological, literary, and commodity history, The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction shows how Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot sacralized Victorian modernity in two contradictory ways: by incarnating their moment as one of transcendent development, and by reenacting bloody rituals from a fading Protestant past.

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.