Victorian Antipathies

This book identifies antipathy as an emotion of key concern in Victorian literature and culture by studying discourses and representations of antipathy in fictional and non-fictional texts. The selected texts cover a broad range of thematic concerns and cultural contexts, engaging with different facets, manifestations, and functions of antipathy, and demonstrating its historically specific meanings in nineteenth-century British and imperial literature and culture. The contributors demonstrate how antipathy was presented as an emotional experience, discursive strategy, and aesthetic device that expressed, shaped, and interrogated Victorian power relations, and how it was used to negotiate structural dynamics of gender, class, and race. Bringing the study of Victorian literature and culture into conversation with approaches in the history of emotions, the volume explores the potential for considering historical conceptualisations of antipathetic feelings in and through literature, and offers methodological insights into the uses of literature in the history of emotions.