British Literature Book List · 
British Literature titles sorted by release date (or by book title):
The Complete Works of Robert Browning with Variant Readings and Annotations, Volume XVII
Volume XVII
Edited by Ashby Bland Crowder and Allan C. Dooley
With this seventeenth and final volume, The Complete Works of Robert Browning concludes the major phase of a great scholarly project: the accurate preservation and transmission of the poet’s works for future generations of readers.…
Available February 2012 (est.)
Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925
Today’s mass-market romances have their precursors in late Victorian popular novels written by and for women. In Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance Martin Hipsky scrutinizes some of the best-selling British fiction from the period 1885 to 1925, the era when romances, especially those by British women, were sold and read more widely than ever before or since.…
Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913
A Critical Anthology
Edited by Mary Ellis Gibson
Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology makes accessible for the first time the entire range of poems written in English on the subcontinent from their beginnings in 1780 to the watershed moment in 1913 when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature.…
Amy Levy
Critical Essays
Edited by Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman
Amy Levy has risen to prominence in recent years as one of the most innovative and perplexing writers of her generation. Embraced by feminist scholars for her radical experimentation with queer poetic voice and her witty journalistic pieces on female independence, she remains controversial for her representations of London Jewry that draw unmistakably on contemporary antisemitic discourse.…
X Marks the Spot
Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895
During the nineteenth century, geography primers shaped the worldviews of Britain’s ruling classes and laid the foundation for an increasingly globalized world. Written by middle-class women who mapped the world that they had neither funds nor freedom to traverse, the primers employed rhetorical tropes such as the Family of Man or discussions of food and customs in order to plot other cultures along an imperial hierarchy.…
The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XV
With Variant Readings and Annotations
Edited by Allan C. Dooley, David Ewbank, Jack W. Herring and Paul D. L. Turner
By Robert Browning
In the 1880s, the aging Browning showed once again the remarkable versatility of his lyric and narrative talents. Ranging across eras and cultures, the books here reveal his late thoughts about history, myth, legend, faith, love, and desire.…
Bleak Houses
Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction
The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 opened magistrates' courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings, and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began.…
The Fin-de-Siècle Poem
English Literary Culture and the 1890s
Edited by Joseph Bristow
Featuring innovative research by emergent and established scholars, The Fin-de-Siècle Poem throws new light on the remarkable diversity of poetry produced at the close of the nineteenth century in England.…
Inaugural Wounds
The Shaping of Desire in Five Nineteenth-Century English Narratives
Desire, Jacques Lacan suggests, is a condition or expression of our wounded nature. But because such desire is also unconscious, it can be expressed only indirectly, for what we consciously desire is hardly ever what we really want.…
Subjects on Display
Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity
By Beth Newman
Subjects on Display explores a recurrent figure at the heart of many nineteenth-century English novels: the retiring, self-effacing woman who is conspicuous for her inconspicuousness. Beth Newman draws upon both psychoanalytic theory and recent work in social history as she argues that this paradoxical figure, who often triumphs over more dazzling, eye-catching rivals, is a response to the forces that made personal display a vexed issue for Victorian women.…
Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation
William Blake’s reputation as a staunch individualist is based in large measure on his repeated attacks on institutions and belief systems that constrain the individual’s imagination. Blake, however, rarely represents isolation positively, suggesting that the individual’s absolute freedom from communal pressures is not the ideal.…
Shakespeare at the Cineplex
The Kenneth Branagh Era
By Samuel Crowl
Samuel Crowl's Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era is the first thorough exploration of the fifteen major Shakespeare films released since the surprising success of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989).…
Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies
Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market
Of the many literary phenomena that sprang up in eighteenth-century England and later became a staple of Victorian culture, one that has received little attention until now is the “Family Bible with Notes.…
Vernon Lee
Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual
By Christa Zorn
The subject of renewed interest among literary and cultural scholars, Vernon Lee wrote more than forty books, in a broad range of genres, including fiction, history, aesthetics, and travel literature. Early on, Lee established her reputation as a public critic whose unconventional viewpoints stood out among those of her contemporaries.…
Women, Work, and Representation
Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature
In Victorian England, virtually all women were taught to sew; needlework was allied with images of domestic economy and with traditional female roles of wife and mother- with home rather than factory. The professional seamstress, however, labored long hours for very small wages creating gowns for the upper and middle classes.…
Signs of Their Times
History, Labor, and the Body in Cobbett, Carlyle, and Disraeli
From the 1820s through the 1840s, debate raged over what Thomas Carlyle famously termed “the Condition of England Question.” While much of the debate focused on how to remedy the material sufferings of the rural and urban working classes, for three writers in particular--William Cobbett, Thomas Carlyle, and Benjamin Disraeli--the times were marked by an even more pervasive crisis that threatened not only the material lives of workers, but also the very stability of meaning itself.…
Dark Smiles
Race and Desire in George Eliot
Although George Eliot has long been described as “the novelist of the Midlands,” she often brought the outer reaches of the empire home in her work. Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot studies Eliot's problematic, career-long interest in representing racial and ethnic Otherness.…
Christina Rossetti and Illustration
A Publishing History
Readers do not always take into account how books that combine image and text make their meanings. But for the Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti, such considerations were central. Christina Rossetti and Illustration maps the production and reception of Rossetti's illustrated poetry, devotional prose, and work for children, both in the author's lifetime and in posthumous twentieth-century reprints.…
Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time
Edited by Christine L. Krueger
We are a century removed from Queen Victoria's death, yet the culture that bears her name is alive and well across the globe. Not only is Victorian culture the subject of lively critical debate, but it draws widespread interest from popular audiences and consumers.…
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