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

This is a study of Victorian middle-class fatherhood from the fathers' own perspective. It aims to dismantle the classic stereotype of the nineteenth-century paterfamilias by focusing on the lives of influential public men, ranging from novelists to politicians, scientists and leading churchmen.

A study of Oscar Wilde's Hellenism and the influence it had on his life and works. It offers new perspectives on The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest and delivers an insight into the source of Wilde's inspirations and the intellectual currents that shaped him.

Featuring a wide range of images, from paintings displayed at Royal Academy exhibitions and in the Houses of Parliament to wood engravings in Punch and the Illustrated London News, this study offers new perspectives on the connections between Victorian art and politics by examining visualizations of franchise reform.

This book analyses works by Jane Austen, W. M. Thackeray, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, as well as extensive material from nineteenth-century dance manuals, to show how dance provided a vehicle through which writers could convey social commentary and cultural critique on issues such as gender, social mobility, and nationalism.

A study exploring the prevalence of bigamy as a popular plot in Victorian fiction that upends familiar categories and revises our sense of the period's social and narrative conventions. It features the innovative use of periodical archives, an exhaustive appendix, and detailed close readings of familiar and unfamiliar novels.

This first full-length study of the influence of Shakespeare and his plays on Victorian women sheds light on the work of actresses and writers, the reading habits of women generally, and the education of girls in the nineteenth century.

Offers an account of high and low literature and culture in the years leading up to the 1867 Reform Act. It argues that writers and artists re-evaluated their role as Britain moved towards democracy. Some embraced the crowd; some tried to escape from it; others tried to manipulate it.

The first study of Marian Evans's career as a journalist, editor and serial-fiction writer arguing the importance of periodical culture in the making of 'George Eliot'. It considers the limits of her pseudonymous identity and charts her move to vocal criticism of celebrity culture and the power of the press.

Explores how the range and subject-matter of Anglophone poetry were diversified by the Victorian practice of translation. This study offers a new account of translation's dynamic role in nineteenth-century culture, gives fresh interpretations of canonical and non-canonical poems, and describes poetic translation into, as well as out of, English.

Examines the ways in which nineteenth-century England, under the influence of industrializing forces and increased precision in assessing the passing of time, began to attach new importance to moments, and how writers introduced into major works of fiction incidents and events of great significance compressed into small units of time.

This first modern full-length study of the silver-fork novel argues that such novels, wildly popular in the early years of the nineteenth century and yet condemned by contemporary critics as dangerously seductive, were in fact political fictions designed to effect an alliance of the middle-classes and the aristocracy.

This book explores the role of sacrifice in the Victorian novel and how the idea of self-abnegation was placed under pressure by increasing industrialisation and democratisation. Work by Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot and others registers the tensions caused by evolving attitudes at a time of legal and theological change.

This book combines an analysis of literature and art, women's history and culture, and real and conceptual gardens as it reconsiders the role of the garden in educational, aesthetic, and political debates from 1780 to 1870. Written in a lively and engaging style and amply illustrated.

This study examines representations of tuberculosis in Victorian fiction, analyzing consumptive characters for insights into how society viewed this 'dread disease' and its sufferers, and revealing the myths which surrounded this socially significant illness. It displays, also, how popular assumptions were used as diagnostic tools by a frustrated medical profession.

Examining works by writers including Wordsworth, Dickens and Conan Doyle, as well as spectacles such as the Great Exhibition, Tanya Agathocleous shows how London was conceived as a cosmopolis - an image of the world that allowed writers and readers to come to grips with the advent of globalization.

In this 2006 book, Jonathan Smith explains how Darwin managed to illustrate the unillustratable - his theories of natural selection - by manipulating the visual conventions of natural history. With its many illustrations this study provides new insights into this little known aspect of Darwin's lasting influence on literature, art and culture.

In this text, Jill Matus goes beyond existing studies of the history of trauma to argue that both Victorian psychology and the novel were significant antecedents of twentieth-century trauma theory. In particular, the Victorian novel was instrumental in shaping the idea of the haunted, possessed and traumatized subject.

Nadia Valman investigates how the figure of the Jewess brought the instabilities of nineteenth-century religious, racial and national identity into sharp focus. Reading Walter Scott, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope alongside Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy, Valman demonstrates the remarkable persistence of this theme across the century.

This book links literary works to psychological and philosophical beliefs of the Victorian era, by demonstrating a common concern among poets, novelists, philosophers, psychologists, and devotees of the occult with the question of whether thinking about someone can cause something to happen to them.

Examines how realism in the nineteenth-century novel became so extreme in its portrayal of human experience that it blurred into satire. Close study of the novels of Eliot, Hardy, Gissing, and Conrad, and the theater of Ibsen, reveals how Victorian realism's transfiguration into satire ultimately led to its demise.

Epic poetry in the Homeric style was widely seen as an ancient and anachronistic genre, yet Victorian authors worked to recreate it for the modern world. Simon Dentith explores the relationship between epic and the British national identity in the works of Scott, Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Morris and Kipling.

This cultural history of the honeymoon explores accounts in novels such as Middlemarch, conduct material, and a case study of 61 real-life honeymooning couples through private letters and diaries. Helena Michie uncovers the meaning of the honeymoon for Victorian expectations of marriage.

Between 1838 and 1852, the leading Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star, published over 1,000 poems by more than 350 poets. As well as examining the critical history of Chartist poetry, this book explores its contribution to the struggle for democratic rights, analysing the interplay between politics, aesthetics and history.

This book studies the influence of the Crimean War (1854-6) on British literary culture, this book explores how mid-Victorian writers and artists reacted to the original 'media war'. By looking at journalism, novels, poetry, and visual art, the book demonstrates the tremendous cultural force of this event.

Matt Cook explores the relationship between London and homosexuality in the period 1885 to 1914. Cook combines discussion of London's homosexual subculture and various major and minor scandals with a detailed examination of representations in the press, in science and in literature.

In this book Cannon Schmitt shows how Darwin and other Victorian naturalists transformed their encounters with the South American continent and its indigenous peoples into influential accounts of biological change, race, and the origins of humanity. His observations open a new discussion concerning the cultural meanings of evolutionary theory in the Victorian period.

In this unusual study of a previously neglected literary form, Amanpal Garcha shows how the literary sketch influenced the careers of William Thackeray, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, transformed the marketplace for fiction, and led to the development of some of the Victorian novel's key formal and ideological elements.

Ruskin's God, first published in 1999, was the first full-length study of the impact that John Ruskin's religion had upon his writings. Michael Wheeler shows how Ruskin drew upon ancient wisdom, first to teach people how to see paintings, buildings and landscapes, and later to teach people how to live.

Combines literary criticism and historical analysis, examining a wide range of sources to rescue the stories of ordinary black Jamaicans and travelling African Americans from historical obscurity. At the same time, the book uses canonical fiction to show how crucial Caribbean culture was in the development of British fiction.

'Michael Field' (1884-1914) was the literary pseudonym of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who lived and wrote together as 'lovers'. Together they produced many poems and dramas and a vast diary. Marion Thain recounts the development of a fascinating and idiosyncratic poetic persona.