Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Focusing on criminality, caste, inheritance and adoption, this text illustrates how crosscurrents between literature and the law shaped, and were shaped by, broader Victorian ideological norms, appealing to scholars and students of nineteenth-century literature, colonial and legal history, and particularly Indian colonial culture.

Introducing the neglected tradition of Scottish women's writing to readers who may already be familiar with English Victorian realism or the historical romances of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, this book corrects male-dominated histories of the Scottish novel by demonstrating how women appropriated the masculine genre of romance.

Pondering the town he had invented in his novels, Anthony Trollope had 'so realised the place, and the people, and the facts' of Barset that 'the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps'. After his novels end, William Thackeray wonders where his characters now live, and misses their conversation. How can we understand the novel as a form of artificial reality? Timothy Gao proposes a history of virtual realities, stemming from the imaginary worlds created by novelists like Trollope, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Dickens. Departing from established historical or didactic understandings of Victorian fiction, Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel recovers the period's fascination with imagined places, people, and facts. This text provides a short history of virtual experiences in literature, four studies of major novelists, and an innovative approach for scholars and students to interpret realist fictions and fictional realities from before the digital age. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Synthesizing music, literature and theory, Fraser Riddell reveals the importance of music in emergent queer identities at the fin de siecle. Illuminating for both students and researchers of the period, his compelling arguments for music's queer agency will fascinate anyone interested in Aestheticism, Decadence and the Bloomsbury Group.

Celebrating plurality in collaboration and underscoring the truly social nature of nineteenth-century writing, Heather Witcher draws on a range of examples to show the myriad ways, both social and material, in which nineteenth-century authors interacted and co-created. Ultimately, this study overhauls how we view authorship itself.

Richard Menke links media innovation to imaginative literature, making the case for writers from Whitman to Twain, Kipling to Bram Stoker and Marie Corelli as the era's media theorists. This book will appeal to scholars, students and researchers of nineteenth-century literature and culture, the history of printing, and media and technology.

The first book to study the rise of Victorian autobiography as a marketplace phenomenon rather than a vehicle for constructing identity, and to relate life-writing to broader cultural impulses to imagine identity as a textual thing. It will particularly appeal to scholars of nineteenth-century literature, book history and material culture.

Explores the notion of plagiarism in Victorian fiction and how many writers of this period stole, altered or parodied the characters and plots of previous texts. This book will appeal to students and researchers of nineteenth-century literature and culture, and readers interested in issues of plagiarism, copyright, and intellectual property.

Elegantly and persuasively argues that natural theology was an important presence, not only in the natural histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also in the novels of the same period. Will appeal to students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature and historians of science.

Anna Feuerstein offers innovative readings of the politics of animal characters in the Victorian novel, and shows the limitations of liberalism as a framework for animal rights. This book will appeal to scholars and students interested in Victorian literature and culture, and the representation of animals in literature.

Investigating links between literature, science, psychology, religion, law, and ethics, this study re-evaluates nineteenth-century understandings of what it means to be human. Leading scholars argue for the centrality of the idea of the human within the works of the Bronte sisters, offering new insight on their writing and cultural contexts.

This book explores the failure of the Romantic critique of political economy by following changing conceptions of idleness and aesthetic consciousness from Shelley to Freud. Richard Adelman delivers an innovative study of cultural politics between 1815 and 1900 that shines new light on the complex legacy of Romantic thought.

This book investigates the often surprising intersections and overlaps between three infrequently related fields: studies of poetry, studies of media, and studies of the body. At these intersections a neglected nineteenth-century theory of poetry becomes visible, one that imagines the body as a reproductive medium for poetry.

The radical press of the Victorian era fostered daring literary experiments that helped shape mainstream literature. This book adds significantly to the study of Victorian literary culture by exploring the interplay between canonical social problem novels and journalism and fiction appearing in the periodical press associated with working-class protest.

This nuanced yet accessible study is the first to examine the range of religious experience imagined in Hopkins' writing. By exploring the shifting way in which Hopkins imagines religious belief in individual history, Martin Dubois contests established views of his poetry as a unified project.

Heather Tilley examines the huge shifts that took place in the experience and conceptualisation of blindness during the nineteenth century. Considering the ways in which visually-impaired people used texts to shape their own identities, she argues that blindness was also a means by which writers reflected on crafting literary form.

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain is an innovative study of the stylistic tics of canonical novelists including Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. Jonathan Farina shows how ordinary locutions such as 'a decided turn', 'as if' and 'that sort of thing' condense nineteenth-century manners, aesthetics and assumptions about what counts as knowledge.

An original and wide-ranging study that examines the convergence of evolutionary theory, educational reform, and Victorian children's literature. It includes discussions of evolutionary ideas underpinning the work of Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, and Frances Hodgson Burnett.

This fascinating study uncovers the rich variety of exploration texts flourishing before the Victorian equation of discovery with disaster: from the manuscript culture of secretive corporations like the Hudson's Bay Company, to the Admiralty and its illustrated books of naval science, to the Victorian popular exhibits of disaster relics.

The hands of colonized subjects were vital sites of fascination and interpretation in late-Victorian imperial narratives. The book considers accounts of fingerprinting, amputation, disease, manual labor, and mummification as central examples of the racial significance assigned to hands around the fin de siecle.

A study of the occult in the popular fiction of the late Victorian period, exploring not only the immense appeal, at that time, of accounts of the paranormal, but also the ways in which ideas of the paranormal seeped into perceptions of authorship and creativity.

Deborah Lutz investigates the high value the Victorians placed on the artefacts and personal effects of the dead. By close study of works by Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Thomas Hardy, Lutz explores the ways these objects were used in creative narratives for emotional effect.

Nicholas Daly offers a lively and provocative account of the transformation of culture by the population explosion of the nineteenth century. Finding examples in everything from ghost stories to opera to fashion, Daly shows how narratives and images of crowded city life circulated among Paris, London and New York.

Bradley Deane explores popular literature of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras to reveal how imperial politics reshaped ideals of manliness. Deane's analysis of texts, by writers including Kipling, Conrad and Conan Doyle, also reveals how these new ideals reinforced and propagated the politics of the New Imperialism.

An innovative and interdisciplinary study of the Victorian novel's relationship to visual art, showing how major authors including Dickens, Thackeray, Collins and Hardy borrowed from debates about museums, exhibitions, and the art market, as they tried to reach a new readership with new kinds of novels.

Will Abberley explores how Victorian fiction and science imagined the evolution of language, providing a new, historical angle on current debates about language evolution and the language of science. Abberley offers fresh perspectives on authors including Thomas Hardy and H. G. Wells, and genres including utopian, historical and science fiction.

The Victorians first articulated key questions about sustainability and global eco-catastrophe that are now staples of our cultural discourse. Allen MacDuffie explores the way in which the imaginative literature of the nineteenth century sought to address these emerging ecological concerns and helped in the creation of society's environmental consciousness.

How did Victorian novelists including Eliot, Hardy and Wells respond to contemporary men of science who aligned scientific practice with moral excellence in an endeavor to secure cultural authority for their discipline? Anne DeWitt argues that novelists came to reject this alignment, denying that science held widely accessible moral benefits.

In this fascinating, full-length study surveying the diverse ways in which a living was made from death, Claire Wood examines Dickens's creative works, including The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, within the context of his attitude towards the Victorian commodification of death.

Studies of the literature of the British imperialism too often focus on India to the exclusion of other areas. This book redresses the balance by demonstrating how integral China and the Chinese were to the British imagination and to globalization, literature, aesthetics and popular culture from the 1840s to 1911.