Books in the Victorian Literature & Culture series

This study uses 19th-century urban fiction - in particular the novels of Hugo and Dickens - to define a genre: the novel of urban mysteries. He argues that within these extravagant but fact-obsessed narratives the archaic form of allegory became a means for understanding modern cities.

This volume studies Victorian female protagonists who participate in the public universe conventionally occupied by men. The author examines classical novels by female authors in relation to each other and to developments in the emerging British women's movement.

In this text, Schaffer analyzes writers such as Lucas Malet, Ouida, Alice Meynell, Rosamund Marriott Watson and Una Ashworth Taylor. These women used aestheticism to forge a compromise between the two models of female identity available to them - the New Woman and the Angel in the House.

Taking as his point of departure the competing uses of the critical term, the materiality of writing, the author turns to the past in this provocative book to recover the ways in which the multiple aspects of writing now conjured by that term were represented and related to one another in the mid-nineteenth century.

This analysis probes the nature of place and the structuring of desire in Tennyson's poetry. Focusing on the poet's early writings - fragments and poems produced between 1824 and 1833 - the author conflates desconstructive theory with psychoanalytic insights.