Books in the Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature series

The repetitions and reiterations of the Victorian in contemporary culture document an unbroken fascination with the histories, technologies and achievements, as well as the injustices and atrocities, of the nineteenth century. They also reveal how contemporary identities are constructed through a Victorian mirror image fabricated by the desires, imaginings and critical interests of the present. Providing analyses of current negotiations of nineteenth-century texts, discourses and traumas, this volume explores the contemporary commodification and nostalgic recreation of the past.

Examines the broadly neglected body of Victorian women's religious verse, showing how women of the period used an array of inventive literary strategies to construct and wield provocative forms of authority.

Demonstrates the way in which representations of the Victorian suburb in mid- to late-nineteenth century British writing occasioned a literary sub-genre that attempted to reassure readers that the suburb was a place where outsiders could be controlled and where middle-class values could be enforced.

Utilizing an array of cultural texts, fiction, servant autobiography, diaries and pamphlets, this study examines the debate on mass literacy as it developed around the figure of the Victorian servant, as well as its significance for understanding the nexus between class and narrative power in nineteenth-century literature.

A study of American women's narratives of mobility and travel. It examines how geographic movement opened up other movements or mobilities for antebellum women at a time of great national expansion. It demonstrates how women not only went out on the open road, but participated in public discussions of nationhood in the texts they wrote.

Examines the ways 'contagion' or disease inform and shape a variety of nineteenth century texts and contexts. Dissecting the cultural assumptions concerning disease, health, and impurity, this book focuses on certain key texts including Dicken's "Bleak House", Gaskell's "Ruth", and Zola's "Le Docteur Pascal".

The Victorians elevated the home and heteronormative family life to an almost secular religion. Yet alongside the middle-class domestic ideal were other families, many of which existed in the literature of the time. Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature is chiefly concerned with these atypical or "queer" families. This collection serves as a corrective against limited definitions of family and is a timely addition to Victorian studies. Interdisciplinary in nature, the collection opens up new possibilities for uncovering submerged, marginalized, and alternative stories in Victorian literature. Broad in scope, subjects range from Count Fosco and his animal "children" in Wilkie Collins''s The Woman in White, to male kinship within and across Alfred Tennyson''s In Memoriam and Herman Melville''s Moby-Dick, and the nexus between disability and loving relationships in the fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge. Queer Victorian Families is a wide-ranging and theoretically adventurous exposé of the curious relations in the literary family tree.

This collection brings together thirteen essays by leading experts who provide new interdisciplinary perspectives on constructions of old age in literary, legal, scientific and periodical cultures of the nineteenth century. The book develops new approaches to agency and sexuality in old age, and to the narrative aesthetics of old age.

This volume asks how and why issues of sexuality, desire, and economic processes intersect in the literature and culture of the Victorian fin de siècle. It considers how the literature of the period meditates on the interaction between economy and desire, doing so with particular reference to the themes of fetishism, homoeroticism, the literary marketplace, social hierarchy, and consumer culture. Drawing on queer-, feminist-, and gift-theory, contributors build on recent critical developments in fin-de-siècle literature (including interventions in the areas of Decadence, sexuality, and gender studies), offering an important contribution to 19thC and Victorian literary studies.

This book makes an important contribution to transatlantic literary studies and an emerging body of work on identity formation and print culture in the Atlantic world. The collection identifies the ways in which historically-situated but malleable subjectivities engage with popular and pressing debates about class, slavery, natural knowledge, democracy, and religion. In addition, the book also considers the ways in which material texts and genres, including, for example, the essay, the guidebook, the travel narrative, the periodical, the novel, and the poem, can be scrutinized in relation to historically-situated transatlantic transitions, transformations, and border crossings. The volume is underpinned by a thorough examination of historical and conceptual frameworks and prioritizes notions of circulation and exchange, as opposed to transfer and continuance, in its analysis of authors, texts, and ideas. The collection is concerned with the movement of people, texts, and ideas in the currents of transatlantic markets and politics, taking a fresh look at a range of canonical and popular writers of the period, including Austen, Poe, Crèvecoeur, Brockden Brown, Sedgwick, Hemans, Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, and Melville. In different ways, the essays gathered together here are concerned with the potentially empowering realities of the transitive, circulatory, and contingent experiences of transatlantic literary and cultural production as they are manifest in the long nineteenth century.