Contexts – serie

The early twentieth century saw modernist writers challenge literary conventions to express their perspectives on a dynamic but unsettling world. This book provides a lucid overview of the period, mapping the literary alongside historical, social and literary issues, and offering informed readings of works by Woolf, Eliot, Lawrence, Pound and Joyce amongst others.

Written in an accessible and manageable style, the books in the Contexts series fill the gap in students' knowledge of the historical facts, literary associations and wider cultural climate of the main literary periods. As well as offering a background in relevant social history, these texts include selected extracts from original documents to give a full flavour of the period in question. Victorian Fiction offers the reader an insight into the cultural, political, and social contexts in which the major Victorian novels were written and read. Moving from the early works of Dickens in the 1830s, to the decadent works of Oscar Wilde and the novels of Thomas Hardy, the book gives an overview of the developments of fiction as a genre, and offers readers a way of understanding the relationship between the Victorian novel and its historical contexts.Victorian Fiction encompasses a wide-range of authors, including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Hardy, and sets them against a background that includes democracy and suffrage reform, sexuality and women's rights, Empire, science and industry, religion, and methods of publication of the novel. By doing this, the book is able to offer students an introduction to the history of the Victorian period, in a form which is most relevant to their reading of the novel. It complements readings of fiction with extracts from seminal non-fiction prose texts of the time, to give a flavour of a variety of Victorian discourses, and to enable students to see how arguments were conducted at the time. Victorian Fiction also includes a time-line of key events, and a bibliography to aid further study.

Brief, manageable and affordable, the books in the Contexts series fill the gap in students' knowledge of the historical facts, literary associations and wider cultural climate of the main literary periods. As well as offering a background in relevant social history, these texts include selected extracts from original documents to give a full flavour of the period in question.

Brief, manageable and affordable, the books in the 'Contexts' series fill the gap in students' knowledge of the historical facts, literary associations and wider cultural climate of the main literary periods. As well as offering a background in relevant social history, these texts include selected extracts from original documents to give a full flavour of the period in question. The Romantic period was a turbulent time in which England changes from a primarily agricultural society to a modern industrial nation. The French Revolution, economic cycles of inflation and depression, and an enlarged and increasingly restless working class, created circumstances for profound social and political change. Looking at poetry and fiction against the 'spirit of the age', this book discusses issues of science and art, psychology and the supernatural, revolutionary politics and social vision, satire and morality, and at the same time provides an introduction to the work of Austen, Blake, Burns, Byron, Keats, Radcliffe, Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth.

The books in the Contexts series provide broad-ranging and accessible information about the literary, historical and cultural background of the major periods and genres, Taking its instigation from the ways in which literary texts define their own area of reference within their historical moment, each volume also questions canonical readings of its period, and contains relevant extracts from contemporary documents to aid further discussion.