British Literature Book List · 
British Literature titles sorted by release date (or by book title):
Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs
Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel
Music was at once one of the most idealized and one of the most contested art forms of the Victorian period. Yet this vitally important nineteenth-century cultural form has been studied by literary critics mainly as a system of thematic motifs.…
Educating Women
Cultural Conflict and Victorian Literature
In 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, no institution of higher education in Britain was open to women. By the end of the century, a quiet revolution had occurred: women had penetrated even the venerable walls of Oxford and Cambridge and could earn degrees at the many new universities founded during Victoria's reign.…
The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XII
Edited by Rita Patteson
By Robert Browning
Edited by Paul Turner
A single work, the complex Aristophanes’ Apology (1875), comprises the twelfth volume of The Complete Works of Robert Browning. Second in Browning’s series of long narrative poems based on classical Greek materials, Aristophanes’ Apology begins as a further adventure of Browning’s young Greek heroine, Balaustion (previously encountered in Balaustion’s Adventure, in Volume X of the present edition).…
The Rescue of Romanticism
Walter Pater and John Ruskin
Valuable and timely in its long historical and critical perspective on the legacy of romanticism to Victorian art and thought, The Rescue of Romanticism is the first book-length study of the close intellectual relationship between Walter Pater and John Ruskin, the two most important Victorian critics of art.…
Hidden Hands
Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction
Tracing the Victorian crisis over the representation of working-class women to the 1842 Parliamentary bluebook on mines, with its controversial images of women at work, Hidden Hands argues that the female industrial worker became even more dangerous to represent than the prostitute or the male radical because she exposed crucial contradictions between the class and gender ideologies of the period and its economic realities.…
Our Lady of Victorian Feminism
The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot
Our Lady of Victorian Feminism is about three nineteenth-century women, Protestants by background and feminists by conviction, who are curiously and crucially linked by their extensive use of the Madonna in arguments designed to empower women.…
The Voice of Toil
Nineteenth-Century British Writings about Work
Edited by David J. Bradshaw and Suzanne Ozment
One of the most recurrent and controversial subjects of nineteenth–century discourse was work. Many thinkers associated work with honest pursuit of doing good, not the curse accompanying exile from Eden but rather “a great gift of God.…
Amy Levy
Her Life and Letters
After a century of critical neglect, poet and writer Amy Levy is gaining recognition as a literary figure of stature.This definitive biography accompanied by her letters, along with the recent publication of her selected writings, provides a critical appreciation of Levy's importance in her own time and in ours.…
Framing Shakespeare on Film
How the Frame Reveals Meaning
The aesthetics of frame theory form the basis of Framing Shakespeare on Film. This groundbreaking work expands on the discussion of film constructivists in its claim that the spectacle of Shakespeare on film is a problem-solving activity.…
Shakespeare Observed
Studies in Performance on Stage and Screen
By Samuel Crowl
In this lively study of both modern film and stage productions of Shakespeare, Samuel Crowl provides fascinating insights into the ways in which these productions have been influenced by one another as well as by contemporary developments in critical approaches to Shakespeare's plays.…
The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume X
With Variant Readings and Annotations
Edited by Allan C. and Susan E. Dooley
The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume X contains critical editions of Balaustion's Adventure: Including a Transcript from Euripides and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society.…
Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China 1842-1907
Three men and three women: a plant collector, a merchant and his novelist wife, a military officer, and two famous women travelers went to China between the Opium War and the formal end of the opium trade, 1842-1907.…
The Culture of Christina Rossetti
Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts
Edited by Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
The Culture of Christina Rossetti explores a “new” Christina Rossetti as she emerges from the scrutiny of the particular historical and cultural context in which she lived and wrote. The essays in this collection demonstrate how the recluse, saint, and renunciatory spinster of former studies was in fact an active participant in her society's attempt to grapple with new developments in aesthetics, theology, science, economics, and politics.…
Virginia Woolf
Reading the Renaissance
Edited by Sally Greene
The story of “Shakespeare’s sister” that Virginia Woolf tells in A Room of One’s Own has sparked interest in the question of the place of the woman writer in the Renaissance. By now, the process of recovering lost voices of early modern women is well under way.…
With Gissing in Italy
The Memoirs of Brian Ború Dunne
Edited by Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young and Pierre Coustillas
A candid portrait of one of England's most celebrated authors In 1897, at age nineteen, American Brian Ború Dunne was an aspiring journalist, who chanced to meet the Englishman George Gissing at the height of his career as a novelist.…
The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XVI
With Variant Readings and Annotations
Edited by Susan Crowl, Roma A. King and Jr.
By Robert Browning
Robert Browning wrote Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day in his seventy-third year. The work is a capstone to the poet's long career, encompassing autobiography as well as influences bearing on the poet's life and career and on Victorian thought and culture in general.…
Ruskin’s Mythic Queen
Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture
John Ruskin's prominence as the author of “Of Queen's Gardens,” his principal statement of Victorian gender opposition, makes him an ideal example for analyzing the power of mythic discourse to undermine gender division.…
Shakespeare in Production
Whose History?
Shakespeare in Production examines a number of plays in context. Included are the 1936 Romeo and Juliet, unpopular with critics of filmed Shakespeare, but very much a “photoplay” if its time; the opening sequences of filmed Hamlets which span more than seventy years; The Comedy of Errors on television, where production of this script is almost impossible; and the Branagh Much Ado About Nothing, a “popular” film discussed in the context of comedy as a genre.…
Dared & Done
The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
By Julia Markus
Based extensively on their writings and letters to each other, this chronicle of Elizabeth Barrett's and Robert Browning's life together stands in bold relief against the backdrop of their Victorian world.…
Detection and Its Designs
Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction
By Peter Thoms
Detective fiction is usually thought of as genre fiction, a vast group of works bound together by their use of a common formula. But, as Peter Thoms argues in his investigation of some of the most important texts in the development of detective fiction in the nineteenth century, the very works that establish the genre's formulaic structure also subvert that structure.…
British Literature titles sorted by release date (or by book title):
