Drawing on the Victorians

Anna Maria Jones is associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self. Her recent articles have appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, European Romantic Review, Criticism, Neo-Victorian Studies, and BRANCH.Rebecca N. Mitchell is reader in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference, coeditor of the anniversary edition of George Meredith's Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, and coauthor, with Joseph Bristow, of Oscar Wilde's Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery.Peter W. Sinnema is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is author of Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News and editor of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Self-Help by Samuel Smiles.Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, is the author of The Manyfaced Glass: Tennyson's Dramatic Monologues (Ohio, 1987), New Woman Poets: An Anthology, and, with Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial and Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell’s Work.

"Drawing on the Victorians is a singularly diverse and multinational collection, a fine critical embodiment of the palimpsest trope that stands … at its conceptual core." (Victorian Studies) "Jones and Mitchell's innovative and pioneering collection will establish new areas of scholarlydebate. Moreover, its focus on 'stories and poems, books and periodicals, comics, cartoons, andother ephemera' will enrich discussions on the interplay between the production andreception of Victorian and neo-Victorian graphic texts and textual images."(Neo-Victorian Studies) "Stunningly transnational … The editors take the notion of the palimpsest as their conceptual frame because it speaks to haunting of one text and/or image by another, a layering, they assert, that becomes particularly complex when linguistic, geographic, historical, and temporal boundaries are crossed." "Research in Victorian and neo-Victorian visual and verbal art receives a welcome boost from this collection. Not claiming to be a definitive map or theory, it nonetheless at every point opens up new questions for debate and new topics for investigation by future critics and scholars." "This pioneering work in illustration studies will provide a necessary starting point for future work in the field."