Patrick Brantlinger is Rudy Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (1998), Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain 1694–1994 (1996), Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914 (1990), and Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (1990). William B. Thesing is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He is the author of The London Muse: Victorian Poetic Responses to the City (1982) and the editor of five volumes in Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography: Victorian Prose Writers before 1867 (1986), Victorian Prose Writers after 1867 (1987), Victorian Women Poets (1998), British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880–1914: The Realist Tradition (1994), and Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British Women Poets (2001). He recently edited Caverns of Night: Coal Mines in Art, Literature, and Film (2000).

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• Acknowledgments viiiThe Contributors ixIntroduction 1Patrick Brantlinger and William B. ThesingPART I Historical Contexts and Cultural Issues 91 The Publishing World 11Kelly J. Mays2 Education, Literacy, and the Victorian Reader 31Jonathan Rose3 Money, the Economy, and Social Class 48Regenia Gagnier4 Victorian Psychology 67Athena Vrettos5 Empire, Race, and the Victorian Novel 84Deirdre David6 The Victorian Novel and Religion 101Hilary Fraser7 Scientific Ascendancy 119John Kucich8 Technology and Information: Accelerating Developments 137Christopher Keep9 Laws, the Legal World, and Politics 155John R. Reed10 Gender Politics and Women’s Rights 172Hilary M. Schor11 The Other Arts: Victorian Visual Culture 189Jeffrey Spear12 Imagined Audiences: The Novelist and the Stage 207Renata Kobetts MillerPART II Forms of the Victorian Novel 22513 Newgate Novel to Detective Fiction 227F. S. Schwarzbach14 The Historical Novel 244John Bowen15 The Sensation Novel 260Winifred Hughes16 The Bildungsroman 279John R. Maynard17 The Gothic Romance in the Victorian Period 302Cannon Schmitt18 The Provincial or Regional Novel 318Ian Duncan19 Industrial and “Condition of England” Novels 336James Richard Simmons, Jr.20 Children’s Fiction 353Lewis C. Roberts21 Victorian Science Fiction 370Patrick BrantlingerPART III Victorian and Modern Theories of the Novel and the Reception of Novels and Novelists Then and Now 38522 The Receptions of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy 387Elizabeth Langland23 Victorian Theories of the Novel 406Joseph W. Childers24 Modern and Postmodern Theories of Prose Fiction 424Audrey Jaffe25 The Afterlife of the Victorian Novel: Novels about Novels 442Anne Humpherys26 The Victorian Novel in Film and on Television 458Joss Marsh and Kamilla ElliottIndex 478