Why Victorian Literature Still Matters

Philip Davis is Professor of English Literature in the School of English, University of Liverpool, UK. He is the author of The Victorians and, most recently, Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life. His other books include The Experience of Reading; Real Voices: On Reading, and Memory and Writing: from Wordsworth to Lawrence, as well as works on Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson. He is also editor of The Reader, a non-academic literary magazine aimed at the serious reader.

"Philip Davis's Blackwell manifesto offers a spirited, polemical defence of Victorian literature in general, and Victorian realism in particular, against its modernist and postmodernist detractors." (Oxford Journals, 1 June 2011) "In Why Victorian Literature Still Matters, Davis writes as a reader.  Readers, as he defines them, are different from scholars and critics. Who distance themselves from the worlds before them by turning to history or theory instead.  Readers, by contrast, do not distance themselves at all, but rather seek ever more closeness." (Victorian Studies, Winter 2010)"Philip Davis's [book] ... Was fascinating about Victorian writing, and one of the best books written about how novels can work." (The Guardian, November 2008)

• Introduction: The Victorian Bump and Where to Find It 11 Victorian Hard Wiring 92 Isaiah and Ezekiel – But What About Charley? 353 Not So Straightforward: Realist Prose and What It Hides Within Itself 544 A Literature In Time 815 Individual Agents 1126 A Few of My Favorite Things: A Glove, a Sandal, and Plaited Hair 138Notes 161Index 168