Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture – serie

Examines the Spiritualist movement's role in disseminating eugenic and hard hereditarian thought.Studying transatlantic spiritualist literature from the mid-19th to the early 20th century, Christine Ferguson focuses on its incorporation and dissemination of bio-determinist and eugenic thought. She asks why ideas about rational reproduction, hereditary determinism and race improvement became so important to spiritualist novelists, journalists and biographers in this period. She also examines how these concerns drove emerging Spiritualist understandings of disability, intelligence, crime, conception, the afterlife and aesthetic production. The book draws on rare material, including articles and serialized fiction from Spiritualist periodicals such as Light, The Two Worlds and The Medium and Daybreak as well as on Spiritualist healing, parentage and sex manuals.Key Features: *The first major study of Transatlantic Spiritualism's sustained commitment to eugenics, bio-determinism and hard hereditarianism *Devotes a chapter to eugenic and raciological writing of Paschal Beverly Randolph, the nineteenth-century African-American Rosicrucian and sex magician whose work has only recently been rediscovered by scholars * Interdisciplinary and historicist methodology * The rich transatlantic reading demonstrates the continuity and influence between British and American Spiritualist writings on the body, reproduction and mental fitness

This book offers an extensive investigation of the life and multi-faceted career of Florence Marryat (1837-1899) the much feted Victorian novelist, editor, actress and public orator.

British India and Victorian Literary Culture extends current scholarship on the Victorian period with a wide-ranging and innovative analysis of the literature of British India. The book traces the development of British Indian literature from the early days of the nineteenth century through the Victorian period. Previously unstudied poems and essays drawn from the thriving periodicals culture of British India are examined alongside novels and travel-writing by authors including Emma Roberts, Philip Meadows Taylor and Rudyard Kipling. Key events and concerns of Victorian India – the legacy of the Hastings impeachment, the Indian ‘Mutiny’, the sati controversy, the rise of Bengal nationalism - are re-assessed within a dual literary and political context, emphasising the engagement of British writers with canonical British literature (Scott, Byron) as well as the mythology and historiography of India and their own responses to their immediate surroundings. Ní Fhlathúin examines representations of the experience of being in India, in chapters on the poetry and prose of exile, and the dynamics of consumption. She also analyses colonial representations of the landscape and societies of India itself, in chapters on the figure of the bandit / hero, female agency and self-sacrifice, and the use of historiography to enlist indigenous narratives in the project of Empire.Description and analysis of the literary marketplace and periodical press, both previously neglectedReassessment of some works of Kipling in the context of a long-standing literary tradition of British IndiaNew analysis of the interactions of metropolitan and colonial literary cultures, and the impact of canonical texts on peripheral marketplacesExamination of Victorian concepts of the colonial relationship in the light of both important writers of British India (Kipling, Meadow Taylor) and others previously unstudiedMáire ní Fhlathúin is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Nottingham.

A scholarly monograph devoted to Jane Morris, an icon of Victorian art whose face continues to grace a range of Pre-Raphaelite merchandiseDescribed by Henry James as a 'dark, silent, medieval woman', Jane Burden Morris has tended to remain a rather one-dimensional figure in subsequent accounts. This book, however, challenges the stereotype of Jane Morris as silent model, reclusive invalid, and unfaithful wife. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as the biographical and literary tradition surrounding William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the book argues that Jane Morris is a figure who complicates current understandings of Victorian female subjectivity because she does not fit neatly into Victorian categories of feminine identity. She was a working-class woman who married into middle-class affluence, an artist's model who became an accomplished embroiderer and designer, and an apparently reclusive, silent invalid who was the lover of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Wilfred Scawen Blunt.Jane Morris and the Burden of History particularly focuses on textual representations - in letters, diaries, memoirs and novels - from the Victorian period onwards, in order to investigate the cultural transmission and resilience of the stereotype of Jane Morris. Drawing on recent reconceptualisations of gender, auto/biography, and afterlives, this book urges readers to think differently - about an extraordinary woman and about life-writing in the Victorian period.Key Features:First scholarly study of Jane Morris, which seeks to challenge the stereotype surrounding her as melancholy invalid and Pre-Raphaelite femme fataleInnovative case study of the role of class, gender and sexuality in the formation of Victorian feminine subjectivityContribution to emerging field of new biography and Victorian afterlives through the inclusion and examination of a wide variety of texts which construct the selfOriginal exploration of feminine creative agency that challenges conventional understandings of masculine artistic autonomy in the Victorian period

Explores how Walter Pater and his contemporary aesthetes were influenced by modern philosophies Repositioning Walter Pater at the philosophical nexus of Aestheticism, this study presents the first discussion of how Pater redefines Romantic Individualism through his engagements with modern philosophical discourses and in the context of emerging modernity in Britain. It also considers the dynamics between form and thought at the fin de siècle, contextualizing its comments in terms of Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee and others, to offer a fully integrated account of the intellectual cultures and currents in this period. Key Features:Boldly reassesses Pater's intellectual significance, arguing that he self-consciously poised on the cusp between late-Victorian Romanticism and ModernismImaginatively combines close readings with cultural and intellectual history and biography to reconsider individualism and philosophical thought in the Aesthetic 'Movement'Provides the most substantial scholarly engagement with Pater's unpublished manuscripts (held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

Explores the fin de siècle mission to open up the ‘Dark Continent’This study maps the effects of a cartographic blankness in literature and its impact upon early Modernist culture, through the nascent discipline of psychoanalysis and the debt that Freud owed to African exploration. It demonstrates that tales of intrepid exploration and of dramatic cultural encounters between indigenous populations - often serialised in missionary magazines - had a profound influence on every facet of late Victorian and early Modernist culture. As Robbie McLaughlan shows, this influence manifested itself most clearly in the late Victorian ‘best-seller’ which blended this arcane Central African imagery with an interest in psychic phenomena. The chapters examine: representations of Black Africa in missionary writing and Rider Haggard's narratives on Africa; cartographic tradition in Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections; and mesmeric fiction, such as Richard Marsh's The Beetle, Robert Buchanan's The Charlatan and George du Maurier's Trilby.Key Features:* Opens up the 'dark continent' and its literary, historical and theoretical manifestations* Argues for an anticipation of a modernist aesthetic suggesting an unexplored relation between fin de siècle sensation literature, in particular mesmeric fiction, and psychoanalysis* Diverges from established colonial histories by drawing on an archive of special and neglected material Keywords: postcolonial, psychoanalysis, fin de siècle, mesmerism, colonial, missionary, cartography

Examines the moving image in relation to nineteenth-century literature, theories of mind, and visual mediaThis book examines how the productive interplay between nineteenth-century literary and visual media paralleled the emergence of a modern psychological understanding of the ways in which reading, viewing and dreaming generate moving images in the mind. Reading between these parallel histories of mind and media reveals a dynamic conceptual, aesthetic and technological engagement with the moving image that, in turn, produces a new understanding of the production and circulation of the work of key nineteenth-century writers, such as Lord Byron, Walter Scott, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray. As Helen Groth shows, this engagement is both typical of the nineteenth-century in its preoccupation with questions of automatism and volition (unconscious and conscious thought), spirit and materiality, art and machine, but also definitively modern in its secular articulation of the instructive and entertaining applications of making images move both inside and outside the mind. Key FeaturesConsiders the impact of the dramatic transformations in print and visual culture on our understanding of the production, circulation and mediation of works by Byron, Scott, Thackeray, Carroll, Dickens, Mayhew and James, as well as lesser-known writers such as Ann and Jane Taylor, Pierce Egan, Countess Blessington, and George SimsProvides a new perspective on the conventional opposition of the early cinema of attractions to the immersive absorption of both nineteenth-century literary formations and later classical narrative cinema

Explores Thomas Hardy’s engagement with Victorian legal debates in his prose fictionThomas Hardy’s fiction is examined in this book in the context of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century as well as legal discourse in the literature of the era. The book examines the ways in which Hardy’s role as a magistrate and his interest in the law impacted fundamentally on his prose fiction. It demonstrates that throughout his prose fiction Hardy engages with contentious legal issues that were debated by legal professionals and literary figures of his day, and argues that Hardy used fiction as a forum to question the extent to which legal reform improved the lives of women and the working classes.The study also looks at the ways in which Hardy deployed criminal plots derived from sensation fiction and reveals that the genre’s engagement with legal reform influenced not only his sensation novel Desperate Remedies (1871) but also the plots of his subsequent fiction.

Provides an innovative approach to articulate what ‘underground’ meant to the Victorians The construction of London’s underground sewers, underground railway and suburban cemeteries created seismic shifts in the geography and the psychological apprehension of the city. Yet, why are there so few literary and aesthetic interventions in Victorian representations of subterranean spaces? What is London’s answer to the Parisian sewers of Victor Hugo or the unflinching realism of Émile Zola’s underworld? Where is the great English underground novel? This study explores this elision not as an absence of imaginative output, but as a presence and plenitude of anxiety and fears that haunt the pages of Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Bram Stoker and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The way in which these writers negotiated the dirt and messiness of underground spaces reveals both the emergence of Gothic, socialist, and modernist sensibilities, and the way all modern cities deal with what is unseen, intangible and inarticulable. The inclusion of illustrations of Victorian maps, cartoons, photographs and art bring the period to life.Key Features: An interdisciplinary study that explores Victorian maps, guidebooks, cartoons and advertisements, alongside literature, journals, photographs and art to bring the period to lifeDraws on modern critical frameworks of Derrida, Lefebvre, and Kristeva to recover and to conceptualize the lost spaces of the Victorian cityRedefines ‘underground’ beyond its spatial usage to look at the emergence of underground revolutionary movements in fin-de-siècle LondonArgues for the distinctiveness of London’s underground culture and its influence on other global cities

This book examines cultural representations of women's experience of the railway in the nineteenth century. Examining the representation of women in the spaces of the railway in literature and culture of the 19th and early 20th century, this book explores the extraordinary and unprecedented opportunities that the train offered women. An emblem of the conquest of national and imperial space and of the staggering advances of science and technology, the train gave women a taste of its omnipotence, eventually becoming a space of emancipation, transgression, but also fear for women. The book brings together the sensation, mystery, realist, and early modernist railway narratives by female and male authors, analyzing women's trajectories within and beyond the city but also the nation, as urban passengers, travellers, tourists, and colonists.In texts by authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Rhoda Broughton, Mary Ward, Flora Annie Steel, and Mona Caird but also Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, the ambiguous space of the railway highlights the artificiality of the private/public divide, while giving rise to woman's impulse to traverse boundaries, not only physically but also mentally and emotionally. In the novels, short stories in periodicals, news items and commentaries, essays, illustrations, and paintings examined, trains become contact zones of multiple encounters, but also battlefields of gender, class, and imperial ideology. The first full length examination of texts by and about women which explore the railway as a gendered space within a British, European, and Imperial context. This book explores a variety of cultural discourses which deal with women and the railway: fiction, poetry, news stories and commentaries, essays, paintings, and illustrations. It concentrates on many understudied writers of the 19th century. It includes 9 images to help illustrate the study.

Explores culturally significant encounters between sensuality and artificiality in the poetry of Wilde, Symons, and Dowson. This book enquires into the problem of venerating artificiality and the inaccessibility of beauty associated with it whilst engaging in the sensuous, immediate experience as it is advocated by Walter Pater. It examines for the first time together poems by three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson. It sees their poems as sites where the self sensually collides with or is immersed in their artifice. This is understood through the shift from Aestheticism to Decadence, which is marked by a greater emphasis on heterodox erotic experience. This study examines Wilde’s early poetry and its role in triggering this shift. It shows how the idea of an erotic encounter with artifice reaches its apex in Symons, and how in Dowson it ripens into vexed non-encounters. Key Features• The first monograph study to focus exclusively on Decadent poetry • Gives original attention to Oscar Wilde’s poetry which has been relatively neglected • Makes an explicit distinction between ‘Aestheticism’ and ‘Decadence’• Includes a Coda which considers how this Decadent poetics transmutes in Modernism.Kostas Boyiopoulos is Teaching Associate at the Department of English Studies, Durham University. His main research specialisms are fin-de-siècle literature and culture, Decadence and Aestheticism, and Anglo-Continental literary transactions. He is a co-editor of The Decadent Short Story: An Annotated Anthology (Edinburgh UP, 2014) and, with Mark Sandy, of the forthcoming essay collection Decadent Romanticism (Ashgate, 2015). He has published articles on late Victorian and Modernist topics.

This interdisciplinary study explores both the personal and political significance of climate in the Victorian imagination. It analyses foreboding imagery of miasma, sludge and rot across non-fictional and fictional travel narratives, speeches, private journals and medical advice tracts. Well-known authors such as Joseph Conrad are placed in dialogue with minority writers such as Mary Seacole and Africanus Horton in order to understand their different approaches to representing white illness abroad. The project also considers postcolonial texts such as Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock to demonstrate that authors continue to 'write back' to the legacy of colonialism by using images of illness from climate.

Explores Victorian writers’ erotic investment in statuesTheorises the function of the sculptural body in Victorian poetry and proseOffers thorough readings of sculpture in Victorian texts and contextsExamines a wide range of works by well-known and lesser-known writers of the period (e.g. Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Olive Custance, Arthur O’Shaughnessy)Extends the British focus to encompass nineteenth-century European and American writings This book argues that, in Victorian literature, transgressive desires that cannot be openly acknowledged are often buried and encrypted in the marble bodies of statues. Examining sculpture’s ubiquity in Victorian galleries and museums, Pulham observes that while touch is prohibited in these cultural locations Victorian texts offer ‘safe’ spaces where sculptures may be kissed or caressed using metaphors of tactility that work at the intersections of touch and vision and permit the recovery of forbidden love.

Explores the lasting cultural and political impact of the events of this remarkable yearOscar Wilde's libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry and its disastrous repercussions dominated British newspapers during the spring of 1895, but as this innovative study reveals, the Wilde scandal was by no means the only event to capture the public's imagination that year. Freak weather, a flu epidemic, a General Election, industrial unrest, 'sex novels' and New Women, trials of murderers and fraudsters, accidents, anarchists, bombers, balloonists and bicyclists were all topics of interest and alarm. Had Jack the Ripper returned? Did the Prime Minister have a dreadful secret? Were Aubrey Beardsley's drawings corrupting the nation's morals? Were overpaid foreign players corrupting English football? Could cricket save a degenerate nation from moral ruin?Drawing on strikingly diverse primary sources, Nicholas Freeman examines the recurrent preoccupations of a turbulent year, showing how 1890s' Britain is at once far removed from our own day and yet strangely familiar.

Examines the Reading Room of the British Museum using documentary, theoretical, historical, and literary sourcesRoomscape explores a specific site—the Reading Room of the British Museum—as a space of imaginative potential in relation to the emergence of modern women writers in Victorian and early twentieth-century London. Drawing on archival materials, Roomscape is the first study to integrate documentary, historical, and literary sources to examine the significance of this space and its resources for women who wrote translations, poetry, and fiction. This book challenges an assessment of the Reading Room of the British Museum as a bastion of class and gender privilege, an image established by Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Roomscape also questions the value of privacy and autonomy in constructions of female authorship. Rather than viewing reading and writing as solitary, Roomscape investigates the public, social, and spatial dimensions of literary production. The implications of this study reach into the current digital era and its transformations of practices of reading, writing, and archiving. Along with an appendix of notable readers at the British Museum from the last two centuries, the book contributes to scholarship on George Eliot, Amy Levy, Eleanor Marx, Clementina Black, Constance Black Garnett, Christina Rossetti, Mathilde Blind, and Virginia Woolf.Key FeaturesAppendix of Notable Readers at the British Museum from 1857-1930 (15 pp) as important resource for museum and library studies.Fresh material about translation work at the British Museum by Eleanor Marx (on Flaubert and Ibsen) and Constance Black Garnett (on Russian authors).Demonstrates the importance of library research for poets including Christina Rossetti, Mathilde Blind, and Amy Levy.Examines George Eliot’s research at the British Museum for her historical novel Romola in relation to how this novel depicts reading, library collection, and gendered scholarship.Offers a new reading of Virginia Woolf’s researching in and writing about the British Museum and the London Library through her diaries, letters, and creative work.Includes a Coda that brings forward the story of the Round Reading Room from the mid-twentieth century, when A. S. Byatt, Isobel Armstrong, and Gillian Beer relied on this space in the early years of their careers, to the aftermath since the official closing in 1997 when the British Library moved to Euston Road. The fate of the Round Reading Room still hangs in the balance.

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian CultureSeries edited by Julian WolfreysDrawing on provocative research, volumes in the series provide timely revisions of the nineteenth-century’s literature and cultureRudyard Kipling's Fiction: Mapping Psychic SpacesLizzy Welby Reads Kipling’s fiction through the lens of French feminism to reinstate the abjected maternal feminine in his artThis study provides an entirely new reading of Kipling's fiction using the feminist psychoanalytic methodology of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, focusing particularly on ideas of the abjected maternal feminine. It examines Kipling's ambivalent relationship to the India of his childhood and the 'loss' of his mother figures. In doing so, it peels back the layers of masculine bravado that continues to characterize Kipling’s fiction to reveal a valorized ‘feminine’ space. From readings of the 1888 story 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep' through The Jungle Book and Stalky & Co., Kim, The Day's Work, Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies, Lizzy Welby demonstrates that Kipling created ways of rediscovering a symbolised feminine landscape as a restorative space, which was part of his 'psychic mapping'.Key Features:Demonstrates a steady development through Kipling’s long and extensive writing careerProvides insights into the man and his art as well as providing a new way of reading KiplingReferences a considerable range of scholarly and biographical work on Kipling, historical and cultural studies of nineteenth century India Offers close reading of passages from Kipling’s fiction, showing how a feminised landscape is violated by (masculine) technological developmentsDr Lizzy Welby is a creative and critical writer specialising in the works of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. She has published articles and chapters on Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath and Angela Carter. In 2012, she was awarded third place at the Bridport Prize for Short Fiction for her story ‘Jugged Hare’. She lives in London and teaches at the College Francais Bilingue de Londres. In 2014 she won first prize in the Lorian Hemingway short story competition for a story entitled ‘The Breakers’ s’.

This study focuses on Anthony Trollope’s stylistic innovations in relation to Victorian liberalismIn his biography of William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope posits the ideal of a man without style: ‘I hold that gentleman to be the best dressed whose dress no one observes. I am not sure but that the same may be said of an author’s written language’. Trollope’s own appearance, unlike his written language, did not pass without observation, however. A contemporary poet recollects that he was ‘hirsute and taurine of aspect’. This study unravels this paradox. It disentangles the many threads in Trollope’s ostensibly transparent writing and reassembles the political and intellectual fabric that they weave, thus showing how Trollope’s language exceeds and questions the concepts provided by contemporary ideologies.Key Features:Shows how Trollope’s stylistic peculiarities perform his inflection of Victorian liberalismReads Victorian literature through the lens of German (post-)Romantic thinkers such as Goethe and Walter BenjaminPresents a panorama of Victorian liberalism in its literary, intellectual, and political contextExamines the writings from the last decade of Trollope’s life that have received only scant critical attention, such as his novellas and his biographies

This book argues that, in Victorian literature, desires which cannot be openly acknowledged are often buried and encrypted in the marble bodies of statues. Examining sculpture's ubiquity in Victorian galleries and museums Pulham observes that, while touch is prohibited in these cultural locations, Victorian texts offer 'safe' spaces where statues may be kissed or caressed using metaphors of tactility that work at the intersections of touch and vision to permit the recovery of forbidden love.

Reconstructs the surprising, self-interested, at times paradoxical attempts of Victorian novelists to define the limits of middle-class statusAdopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines sociological theory, social and political history, and literary history and critiqueMakes a timely contribution to a long tradition of socio-literary study that both stretches back to the nineteenth century itself (i.e., Hippolyte Taine's History of English Literature [1863]) and engages with contemporary literary and social theory (i.e., Maria Bachman and Albert Pionke's The Socio-Literary Imaginary in 19th and 20th Century Britain [2020]) Proposes a new and newly historicized theory of middle-class status grounded in absence that acknowledges the anxiety expressed by members of the Victorian middle classes about their own legitimacy and avoids the over-determined conclusions that sometimes accompany sociological readings of cultural worksReconnecting this more nuanced definition of status to the need for recognition from those in a position to be dominated, shows how Victorian novelists built into their texts a defence of their own individual popularity and of the growing popularity of fiction over poetryCombines readings, both pithy and expansive, of Victorian novels by both major canonical novelists Charlotte Bront , Charles Dickens, George Eliot and less well-remembered authors, such as William North, Charles Reade, and Charlotte Yonge Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status recovers the novelistic pervasiveness of a Reform-Era rhetorical form, the negative assertion of value, which grounds middle-class claims to social authority in repudiations of such conventional warrants as birth, wealth, numerical preponderance, command of fact and, specifically for women, the symbolic phallus. Bringing together historical, literary and sociological theory, this study recaptures the Victorians' broad sense of epistemological uncertainty about their rapidly changing society, reconstructs novelists' specific attempts to legitimate their traditionally low-status genre and offers fresh readings of novels by Charlotte Bront , Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William North, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Yonge, among others.

Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status recovers the novelistic pervasiveness of a Reform-Era rhetorical form, the negative assertion of value, which grounds middle-class claims to social authority in repudiations of such conventional warrants as birth, wealth, numerical preponderance, command of fact and, specifically for women, the symbolic phallus. Bringing together historical, literary and sociological theory, this study recaptures the Victorians' broad sense of epistemological uncertainty about their rapidly changing society, reconstructs novelists' specific attempts to legitimate their traditionally low-status genre and offers fresh readings of novels by Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William North, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Yonge, among others.

Ben Moore presents a new approach to reading urban modernity in nineteenth-century literature, by bringing together hidden, mobile and transparent features of city space as part of a single system he calls 'invisible architecture'. Resisting narratives of the nineteenth-century as progressing from concealment to transparency, he instead argues for a dynamic interaction between these tendencies. Across two parts, this book addresses a range of apparently disparate buildings and spaces. Part I offers new readings of three writers and their cities: Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester, Charles Dickens and London, and Emile Zola and Paris, focusing on the cellar-dwelling, the railway and river, and the department store respectively. Part II takes a broader view by analysing three spatial forms that have not usually been considered features of nineteenth-century modernity: the Gothic cathedral, the arabesque and white walls. Through these readings, the book extends our understanding of the uneven modernity of this period.

Ben Moore presents a new approach to reading urban modernity in nineteenth-century literature, by bringing together hidden, mobile and transparent features of city space as part of a single system he calls 'invisible architecture'. Resisting narratives of the nineteenth-century as progressing from concealment to transparency, he instead argues for a dynamic interaction between these tendencies. Across two parts, this book addresses a range of apparently disparate buildings and spaces. Part I offers new readings of three writers and their cities: Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester, Charles Dickens and London, and Emile Zola and Paris, focusing on the cellar-dwelling, the railway and river, and the department store respectively. Part II takes a broader view by analysing three spatial forms that have not usually been considered features of nineteenth-century modernity: the Gothic cathedral, the arabesque and white walls. Through these readings, the book extends our understanding of the uneven modernity of this period.

Demonstrates what Victorian poetry tells us about the relationship between poetry and timeBrings together various aspects of Victorian poetry under one coherent perspective (changing concepts of time)Discusses a wide range of texts by well-known as well as less familiar Victorian poets Interrogates the historical basis of widely held theoretical assumptions (e.g. the opposition between metre and rhythm, the juxtaposition of temporal narrative and timeless lyric)Presents an analytical framework for the analysis of poetic time structuresCombines historical analysis with a sustained focus on the role of aesthetic formTime and Timelessness in Victorian Poetry explores the question of poetry's relation to time and argues that this relation is historically contingent as the concept of time changes, so too do the shaping forms and definitions of poetry. Victorian literature provides a rich testing field for its hypothesis, since the nineteenth century saw momentous changes in the ways people thought about and experienced time. This book demonstrates that these changes were an important factor for some of the long-term developments in Victorian poetry, like its loss of cultural prestige, the popularity of mixed genres like the poetic sequence, the dramatic monologue and the verse novel, and the demise of metrical poetry as the norm. Moreover, the historical perspective offered questions some widely held assumptions, not only about poetry, but also about time itself. Thus, the theoretical relevance of this study extends well beyond its Victorian context.

Time and Timelessness in Victorian Poetry explores the question of poetry's relation to time and argues that this relation is historically contingent as the concept of time changes, so too do the shaping forms and definitions of poetry. Victorian literature provides a rich testing field for its hypothesis, since the nineteenth century saw momentous changes in the ways people thought about and experienced time. This book demonstrates that these changes were an important factor for some of the long-term developments in Victorian poetry, like its loss of cultural prestige, the popularity of mixed genres like the poetic sequence, the dramatic monologue and the verse novel, and the demise of metrical poetry as the norm. Moreover, the historical perspective offered questions some widely held assumptions, not only about poetry, but also about time itself. Thus, the theoretical relevance of this study extends well beyond its Victorian context.

Examines the Spiritualist movement's role in disseminating eugenic and hard hereditarian thought.Studying transatlantic spiritualist literature from the mid-19th to the early 20th century, Christine Ferguson focuses on its incorporation and dissemination of bio-determinist and eugenic thought. She asks why ideas about rational reproduction, hereditary determinism and race improvement became so important to spiritualist novelists, journalists and biographers in this period. She also examines how these concerns drove emerging Spiritualist understandings of disability, intelligence, crime, conception, the afterlife and aesthetic production. The book draws on rare material, including articles and serialized fiction from Spiritualist periodicals such as Light, The Two Worlds and The Medium and Daybreak as well as on Spiritualist healing, parentage and sex manuals.Key Features: *The first major study of Transatlantic Spiritualism's sustained commitment to eugenics, bio-determinism and hard hereditarianism *Devotes a chapter to eugenic and raciological writing of Paschal Beverly Randolph, the nineteenth-century African-American Rosicrucian and sex magician whose work has only recently been rediscovered by scholars * Interdisciplinary and historicist methodology * The rich transatlantic reading demonstrates the continuity and influence between British and American Spiritualist writings on the body, reproduction and mental fitness

Explores Thomas Hardy’s engagement with Victorian legal debates in his prose fictionThomas Hardy’s fiction is examined in this book in the context of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century as well as legal discourse in the literature of the era. The book examines the ways in which Hardy’s role as a magistrate and his interest in the law impacted fundamentally on his prose fiction. It demonstrates that throughout his prose fiction Hardy engages with contentious legal issues that were debated by legal professionals and literary figures of his day, and argues that Hardy used fiction as a forum to question the extent to which legal reform improved the lives of women and the working classes.The study also looks at the ways in which Hardy deployed criminal plots derived from sensation fiction and reveals that the genre’s engagement with legal reform influenced not only his sensation novel Desperate Remedies (1871) but also the plots of his subsequent fiction.

This interdisciplinary study explores both the personal and political significance of climate in the Victorian imagination. It analyses foreboding imagery of miasma, sludge and rot across non-fictional and fictional travel narratives, speeches, private journals and medical advice tracts. Well-known authors such as Joseph Conrad are placed in dialogue with minority writers such as Mary Seacole and Africanus Horton in order to understand their different approaches to representing white illness abroad. The project also considers postcolonial texts such as Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock to demonstrate that authors continue to 'write back' to the legacy of colonialism by using images of illness from climate.

This exploration of the streets of Dickens's London opens up new perspectives on the city and the writerTaking Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as an inspiration, Dickens's London offers an exciting and original project that opens a dialogue between phenomenology, philosophy and the Dickensian representation of the city in all its forms. Julian Wolfreys suggests that in their representations of London - its streets, buildings, public institutions, domestic residences, rooms and phenomena that constitute such space - Dickens's novels and journalism can be seen as forerunners of urban and material phenomenology. While also addressing those aspects of the urban that are developed from Dickens's interpretations of other literary forms, styles and genres, Dickens's London presents in twenty-six episodes (from Banking and Breakfast via the Insolvent Court, Melancholy and Poverty, to Todgers and Time, Voice and Waking) a radical reorientation to London in the nineteenth century, the development of Dickens as a writer, and the ways in which readers today receive and perceive both.Key FeaturesMajor reassessment of Dickens's writing on the city Dual focus on methodology and the historicity of Dickensian urban consciousnessPhilosophical reflections on urban tropologies through key passages from Dickens's texts recreate the experience of Victorian London Inventive structure offers the reader an experience of the disordered multiplicity of LondonIllustrated with 19 maps and photographs