Books in the Victorian and Edwardian Studies series

Elizabeth Gaskell and the Art of the Short Story

This volume offers an analysis of colonial literature in the late Victorian age with a specific focus on the works of Henry Rider Haggard (1865-1925) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). Starting from the investigation of the nineteenth century as a period of great historical complexity, it places colonial narratives in a wide panorama of social and cultural developments, illustrating the role played by both adventure romances and imperial novels on the ideological and epistemic fabric of this age. By considering late nineteenth-century writing in the context of a multifarious background, the book sheds light on the intellectual discourses that emerged from the culture of imperialism. It also investigates the textual devices through which topical ideas were fictionalized, both in works included in the field of adventure literature and, at a more extended degree, in the whole novel genre. Far from the limits imposed by chronological classification, the stories selected for analysis are introduced in a common conceptual space that contributes to the articulation of a rich literary territory, where crucial themes such as the complications of racial rapports, the ethical failure of the imperial experience, the developments in individual and national identity are explored.

This volume offers a critical insight into the life and work of the controversial Victorian explorer and translator Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890). Analysis focuses on his travel accounts and erotic translations, which both re-elaborated and challenged dominant Victorian discourses on race, gender and sexuality, generating controversies in the fields of anthropology, sexology and medicine. The premise of the study is that Burton entertained an ambiguous relationship with the colonial institutions: on the one hand, he pursued the colonial project, while on the other, he was an irreverent outsider who clashed with the imperial authorities. As this investigation reveals, he defied British sociocultural norms by appropriating and importing the rituals and languages of the colonial subjects. The volume examines Burton's 'impersonations' of multiple masculine identities in the countries that he visited, which involved elaborate processes of both identification and dis-identification. The author argues that these impersonations enabled a series of queer encounters which broke down the barriers between imperial Self and colonised Other, and led Burton to embody several self-conscious, performative constructions of masculinity. Burton's life and works are analysed in light of recent critical and theoretical debates.

The Victorian era was one that teemed with multitudinous and sometimes opposing visions of polity yet rarely questioned the very existence of the State. This book intends to show how nineteenth century thought and culture have shaped British modern political debate and, for some, still continue to do so.

This book explores the extent to which four sensation novelists responded to the Victorian theorizing of professionalism. A crucial period of redefinition of the professional ideal, the third quarter of the nineteenth century also witnessed the rise and the decline of the sensation novel, a scandalous and electrifying form that challenged aesthetic and socio-cultural standards. Owing to their controversial position in the literary marketplace, novelists like Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade and Ellen Wood developed a keen interest in professional issues, which occupy centre stage in their 1850s-70s narratives. By drawing on a variety of sociological, cultural and philosophical theories, Costantini skilfully assesses the ideological implications of the genre's fictionalization of professionalism. She shows how sensation novelists provocatively represented the challenges faced by both elite and rising professionals, who are used as narrative vehicles for thorny discourses on authorship, ethicality, aestheticism and sociocultural identity.

This study traces the poetic development of Arthur Hugh Clough through a methodological approach based on close readings of his most important works with separate chapters devoted to the three great poems of his maturity: The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus. Attention is also given to the socio-cultural context and the religious and political debates which contributed in shaping Clough's artistic and ideological vision, particularly through the influential figures of Thomas Arnold, John Henry Newman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. That Clough remains to this day one of the most neglected nineteenth-century writers is all the more remarkable given the importance of his intellectual contribution to his times and his radical questioning of religious faith, traditional values and poetic norms.

The volume investigates Mario Praz's work from intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches. It considers Praz's writings on comparative literature, design, history of art and culture, collecting, intermedial studies, translation, journalism, travelling and autobiography. It explores his enthusiasm for the eccentric, the erotic and the macabre.