Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel

Francis O’Gorman is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds. He has written widely on Victorian poetry and non-fictional prose, including the books John Ruskin (1999), Late Ruskin: New Contexts (2001), and the Victorian Novel (2002) in the Blackwell Critical Guide Series, and also co-edited the collection Ruskin and Gender (2002). He has published on Milton, Robert Browning, Michael Field, Charles Kingsley, Robert Frost, Henrietta Huxley, Victorian agnosticism, Victorian masculinities, and co-edited a collection of essays on Margaret Oliphant (1999) and on Landscape, Writing and Community (2001). His most recent book, Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, was published by Blackwell in 2004.

"[T]his book succeeds in presenting a representative selection of historicist critical thinking on panorama of themes of the novel during the period of what was, arguably, this literary form's greatest achievement. It will be a stimulating introduction for the advanced undergraduate with an interest in the nineteenth century, and a useful lead for the postgraduate student working in the field of Victorian studies on any one of the numerous taught programmes currently on offer." Reference Reviews

• Notes on Contributors ixAcknowledgements xiiList of illustrations xiiiChronology xivIntroduction 1Francis O’Gorman1 ‘The sun and moon were made to give them light’: Empire in the Victorian Novel 4Cannon Schmitt2 ‘Seeing is believing?’: Visuality and Victorian Fiction 25Kate Flint3 ‘The boundaries of social intercourse’: Class in the Victorian Novel 47James Eli Adams4 Legal subjects, legal objects: The Law and Victorian Fiction 71Clare Pettitt5 ‘The withering of the individual’: Psychology in the Victorian Novel 91Nicholas Dames6 ‘Telling of my weekly doings’: The Material Culture of the Victorian Novel 113Mark W. Turner7 ‘Farewell poetry and aerial flights’: The Function of the Author and Victorian Fiction 134Richard Salmon8 Everywhere and nowhere: Sexuality in the Victorian Novel 156Carolyn Dever9 ‘One of the larger lost continents’: Religion in the Victorian Novel 180Michael Wheeler10 ‘The difference between human beings’: Biology in the Victorian Novel 202Angelique Richardson11 ‘One great confederation?’: Europe in the Victorian Novel 232John Rignall12 ‘A long deep sob of that mysterious wondrous happiness that is one with pain’: Emotion in the Victorian Novel 253Francis O’GormanIndex 271