The Victorian Novel of Adulthood
Plot and Purgatory in Fictions of Maturity
By Rebecca Rainof
In The Victorian Novel of Adulthood, Rebecca Rainof confronts the conventional deference accorded the bildungsroman as the ultimate plot model and quintessential expression of Victorian nation building. The novel of maturity, she contends, is no less important to our understanding of narrative, Victorian culture, and the possibilities of fiction.Reading
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literature · Victorian Studies
Forget Me Not
The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835
By Katherine D. Harris
Katherine D. Harris assesses the phenomenal rise of the literary annual and its origins in English, German, and French literary forms as well as its social influence on women, its redefinition of the feminine, and its effects on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century print culture.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Book and Periodical Studies · Gender Studies · Victorian Studies
Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing
The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875
By Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
In Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing eminent Rossetti scholar Lorraine Janzen Kooistra demonstrates the cultural centrality of a neglected artifact: the Victorian illustrated gift book. Turning a critical lens on “drawing-room books” as both material objects and historical events, Kooistra reveals how the gift book’s visual/verbal form mediated “high” and popular art as well as book and periodical publication.A
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Victorian Studies · Book and Periodical Studies
A Room of His Own
A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland
By Barbara Black
In nineteenth-century London, a clubbable man was a fortunate man, indeed. The Reform, the Athenaeum, the Travellers, the Carlton, the United Service are just a few of the gentlemen’s clubs that formed the exclusive preserve known as “clubland” in Victorian London—the City of Clubs that arose during the Golden Age of Clubs. Why were these associations for men only such a powerful emergent institution in nineteenth-century London?
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · British History · Gender Studies · Victorian Studies
Melodramatic Imperial Writing
From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes
By Neil Hultgren
Melodrama is often seen as a blunt aesthetic tool tainted by its reliance on improbable situations, moral binaries, and overwhelming emotion, features that made it a likely ingredient of British imperial propaganda during the late nineteenth century. Yet, through its impact on many late-Victorian genres outside of the theater, melodrama developed a complicated relationship with British imperial discourse.Melodramatic
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Victorian Studies
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.Mary Ellis Gibson establishes accurate texts for such well-known poets as Toru Dutt and the early nineteenth-century poet Kasiprasad Ghosh.
Poetry Anthology · British Literature · 19th century · India · Literature · Victorian Studies
Reading Victorian Deafness
By Jennifer Esmail
Reading Victorian Deafness is the first book to address the crucial role that deaf people, and their unique language of signs, played in Victorian culture.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Disability Studies · History | Europe | Great Britain | Victorian Era · Victorian Studies · Victorian Era · Literature
Religious Imaginaries
The Liturgical and Poetic Practices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter
By Karen Dieleman
Explores liturgical practice as formative for how three Victorian women poets imagined the world and their place in it and, consequently, for how they developed their creative and critical religious poetics.
British Literature · Literary Criticism · Religion | Christianity · Religion · Poetry · Victorian Studies · Literature · Christina Rossetti
A Room of His Own
A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland
By Barbara Black
In nineteenth-century London, a clubbable man was a fortunate man, indeed. The Reform, the Athenaeum, the Travellers, the Carlton, the United Service are just a few of the gentlemen’s clubs that formed the exclusive preserve known as “clubland” in Victorian London—the City of Clubs that arose during the Golden Age of Clubs. Why were these associations for men only such a powerful emergent institution in nineteenth-century London?
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · British History · Gender Studies · Victorian Studies
Charity and Condescension
Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy
By Daniel Siegel
Charity and Condescension explores how condescension, a traditional English virtue, went sour in the nineteenth century, and considers how the failure of condescension influenced Victorian efforts to reform philanthropy and to construct new narrative models of social conciliation.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Victorian Studies · Social History · United Kingdom
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.Mary Ellis Gibson establishes accurate texts for such well-known poets as Toru Dutt and the early nineteenth-century poet Kasiprasad Ghosh.
Poetry Anthology · British Literature · 19th century · India · Literature · Victorian Studies
Indian Angles
English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore
By Mary Ellis Gibson
Indian Angles is a new historical approach to Indian English literature. It shows that poetry, not fiction, was the dominant literary genre of Indian writing in English until 1860 and re-creates the historical webs of affiliation and resistance that writers in colonial India—writers of British, Indian, and mixed ethnicities—experienced.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literary Criticism, Asia · Literary Criticism, Poetry · India · Literature · Victorian Studies
Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing
The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875
By Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
In Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing eminent Rossetti scholar Lorraine Janzen Kooistra demonstrates the cultural centrality of a neglected artifact: the Victorian illustrated gift book. Turning a critical lens on “drawing-room books” as both material objects and historical events, Kooistra reveals how the gift book’s visual/verbal form mediated “high” and popular art as well as book and periodical publication.A
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Victorian Studies · Book and Periodical Studies
The Wake of Wellington
Englishness in 1852
By Peter W. Sinnema
Soldier, hero, and politician, the Duke of Wellington is one of the best-known figures of nineteenth-century England. From his victory at Waterloo over Napoleon in 1815, he rose to become prime minister of his country. But Peter Sinnema finds equal fascination in Victorian England’s response to the duke’s death.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · British History · United Kingdom · Victorian Studies
Women, Work, and Representation
Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature
By Lynn M. Alexander
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.
Literary Criticism, Women · Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Women’s History · Women’s Studies · Literature · Victorian Studies
Christina Rossetti and Illustration
A Publishing History
By Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
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.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Illustration - History and Criticism · Victorian Studies · 19th century · United Kingdom
Hidden Hands
Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction
By Patricia E. Johnson
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.Drawing
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literary Criticism, Women · Women’s Studies · Literature · Victorian Studies
Our Lady of Victorian Feminism
The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot
By Kimberly VanEsveld Adams
Our Lady of Victorian Feminism is about three nineteenth-century women (Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot), 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.
Literary Criticism, Women Authors · Literary Criticism, Religion · Literary Criticism | Feminist · Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Women’s Studies · Literature · Victorian Studies
Amy Levy
Her Life and Letters
By Linda Hunt Beckman
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.As
Biography, Literary Figures · Letters · Biography & Autobiography | Women · Biography & Autobiography | Jewish · LGBT Literature · British Literature · Literature · Victorian Studies
