British Literature Book List · 
British Literature titles sorted by book title (or by release date):
The Tables Turned
Or, Nupkins Awakened
By William MorrisWilliam Morris is well recognized as an eclectic and energetic contributor to the Victorian artistic and literary scene. Readers of Morris’s languid poetic narratives and archaic prose romances will be intrigued by this editions of his single socialist play, a lively and rich experiment in political prose that offers an unusual example of Morris’s boisterous humor and satirical style.…
Thackeray and Slavery
By Deborah A. ThomasSlavery fascinated Thackeray. For him, the essence of slavery consisted of treating people like things. Thomas examines relationships in Thackeray’s fiction in which people have been reduced to objects and power is an end.…
Vernon Lee
Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual
By Christa ZornThe 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.…
Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China 1842-1907
By Susan Shoenbauer ThurinThree 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.…
Victorian Will
By John Robert ReedJohn R. Reed, author of Victorian Conventions, The Natural History of H.G. Wells, and Decadent Style, has published a new critical study examining nineteenth-century British attitudes toward free will, determinism, providence, and fate.…
Virginia Woolf
Reading the Renaissance
Edited by Sally GreeneThe 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.…
The Voice of Toil
Nineteenth-Century British Writings about Work
Edited by David J. Bradshaw and Suzanne OzmentOne 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.…
Windings of the Labyrinth
Quest and Structure in the Major Novels of Wilkie Collins
By Peter ThomsAuthor of such feats of storytelling as The Woman in White and The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins has traditionally been recognized far more than for his accomplishments as a serious novelist.…
With Gissing in Italy
The Memoirs of Brian Ború Dunne
Edited by Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young and Pierre CoustillasA 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.…
Womanist and Feminist Aesthetics
A Comparative Review
By Tuzyline Jita AllanAlice Walker’s womanist theory about black feminist identity and practice also contains a critique of white liberal feminism. This is the first in-depth study to examine issues of identity and difference within feminism by drawing on Walker’s notion of an essential black feminist consciousness.…
Women, Work, and Representation
Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature
By Lynn M. AlexanderIn 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.…
Wuthering Heights
A Study
By U. C. KnoepflmacherWuthering Heights at once fascinates and frustrates the reader with the highly charged, passionate and problematic relationships it portrays. This study provides a key to the text by examining the temporal and narrative rhythms through which Brontë presents the dualities by which we commonly define our selfhood: child and adult, female and male, symbiosis and separateness, illogic and common sense, classlessness and classboundedness, play and power, free will and determinism.…
X Marks the Spot
Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895
By Megan A. NorciaDuring 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.…
British Literature titles sorted by book title (or by release date):
