Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition – serie

Establishing a fresh critical paradigm, this volume shows how the 1850s was significantly defined by forms of increasing intellectual, class, and geographical mobility. It saw the flourishing of major Victorian writers, including George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Charles Kingsley, Anthony Trollope, Tennyson, and Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Outputs by these writers were read alongside a variety of other genres, including travel writings, learned society reports, statistical returns, popular journalism, working-class writing, and scientific papers in a period which saw an increasing availability of cheap printed matter. Intertextuality and interdisciplinarity are not only key to this volume, but are also one of the most important legacies of the literature of the 1850s. Contributors are attentive to a plethora of voices, disciplines, and forms of knowledge which they read through rigorous 21st-century critical priorities including diversity, cultural and physical geography, and the environment.

How did British literature develop in the wake of the radical 1790s and during the years of war, reaction, and uncertain renewal that constituted the nineteenth century's first decade? The essays in this volume examine the literary forms and cultural formations that emerged during this paradoxical era of aftermath and new beginnings. They reexamine a period within the Romantic period, and within the larger context of the nineteenth century, exploring the historical self-consciousness of this post-revolutionary era and highlighting the emergence of ideas of temporality and historicity that lead us to reconsider the past as comprised of decadal units, of centuries, and of things like 'the age of revolutions' and the spirits that animate them. Using fresh approaches and methodologies, the essays in this book examine the beginnings of the nineteenth century and its literature according to the critical, theoretical, and archival possibilities of the twenty-first.

This instalment in the Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition series concerns a decade that was as technologically transitional as it was eventful on a global scale. It collects work from a group of internationally renowned scholars across disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with the wide array of cultural developments that defined the 1830s. Often overlooked as a boundary between the Romantic and Victorian periods, this decade was, the book proposes, the central pivot of the nineteenth century. Far from a time of peaceful reform, it was marked by violent colonial expansion, political resistance, and revolutionary technologies such as the photograph, the expansion of steam power, and the railway that changed the world irreversibly. Contributors explore a flurry of cultural forms to take the pulse of the decade, from Silver Fork fiction to lithography, from working-class periodicals to photographs, and from urban sketches to magazine fiction.

The 1810s - a decade marked by the challenges of war, monarchy, poverty, religion, and nationalism - are immortalised in Percy Bysshe Shelley's impassioned but despairing sonnet, 'England in 1819', as a graveyard of undead ideologies from which he longs that a 'Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day'. Criticism too often looks past the 1810s and towards the illusory border between 'Romantic' and 'Victorian' to hunt down these bright phantoms and follow their progress into a century of cultural, affective, philosophical, and political transformation. Yet the 1810s were more than a threshold decade from which we were thrown into the beginnings of the modern world. As the essays in this volume reveal, the 1810s brought into focus new questions about subjects as broad as the imagination, literary form, morality, aesthetics, race, politics, the environment, the body, gender, and sexuality.

What does it mean to focus on the decade as a unit of literary history? Emerging from the shadows of iconic Victorian authors such as Eliot and Tennyson, the 1880s is a decade that has been too readily overlooked in the rush to embrace end-of-century decadence and aestheticism. The 1880s witnessed new developments in transatlantic networks, experiments in lyric poetry, the decline of the three-volume novel, and the revaluation of authors, journalists and the reading public. The contributors to this collection explore the case for the 1880s as both a discrete point of literary production, with its own pressures and provocations, and as part of literature's sense of its expanded temporal and geographical reach. The essays address a wide variety of authors, topics and genres, offering incisive readings of the diverse forces at work in the shaping of the literary 1880s.

The 1870s were defined by cultural confidence, moral superiority, and metropolitan elitism. This volume examines and unsettles a decade closely associated with 'High Victorianism' and the popular emergence of 'Victorian' as a term for the epoch and its literature. Writers active in the 1870s were self-conscious about contemporary claims to modernity, reform, and progress, themes which they explored through conversation, conflict, and innovation, often betraying uncertainty about their era. The chapters in this volume cover a broad range of canonical and lesser known British and colonial writers, including George Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Rossettis, Emily Pfeiffer, John Ruskin, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Ellen Wood, Toru Dutt, Antony Trollope, Dinah Craik, Susan K. Phillips, Thomas Hardy, and Rolf Boldrewood. Together they offer a variety of methodologies for a pluralist literary history, including approaches based on feminism, visual cultures, digital humanities, and the history of narrative and poetic genres.

Offering an in-depth overview and reappraisal of the 1860s in British literature, this innovative volume features in-depth analyses from noted scholars at the tops of their fields. Covering characteristic literary genres of the 1860s (including sensation and lyric, as well as Golden Age children's literature), and topics of current and enduring interest in the field, from empire and slavery to evolution, environmental issues and economics, it incorporates drama as well as poetry and fiction, and emphasizes the history of publishing and periodicals so important to the period. Chapters are attentive to the global context, from Ireland on the stage, to Bengali literature, to Britain's muted response to the US Civil War. The Introduction gives an overview that places these individual chapters in the historical context of the 1860s, as well as the current scholarly conversation in the field.