Bücher der Reihe Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature

This collection brings together thirteen essays by leading experts who provide new interdisciplinary perspectives on constructions of old age in literary, legal, scientific and periodical cultures of the nineteenth century. The book develops new approaches to agency and sexuality in old age, and to the narrative aesthetics of old age.

This volume asks how and why issues of sexuality, desire, and economic processes intersect in the literature and culture of the Victorian fin de siècle. It considers how the literature of the period meditates on the interaction between economy and desire, doing so with particular reference to the themes of fetishism, homoeroticism, the literary marketplace, social hierarchy, and consumer culture. Drawing on queer-, feminist-, and gift-theory, contributors build on recent critical developments in fin-de-siècle literature (including interventions in the areas of Decadence, sexuality, and gender studies), offering an important contribution to 19thC and Victorian literary studies.

Examines the broadly neglected body of Victorian women's religious verse, showing how women of the period used an array of inventive literary strategies to construct and wield provocative forms of authority.

This book makes an important contribution to transatlantic literary studies and an emerging body of work on identity formation and print culture in the Atlantic world. The collection identifies the ways in which historically-situated but malleable subjectivities engage with popular and pressing debates about class, slavery, natural knowledge, democracy, and religion. In addition, the book also considers the ways in which material texts and genres, including, for example, the essay, the guidebook, the travel narrative, the periodical, the novel, and the poem, can be scrutinized in relation to historically-situated transatlantic transitions, transformations, and border crossings. The volume is underpinned by a thorough examination of historical and conceptual frameworks and prioritizes notions of circulation and exchange, as opposed to transfer and continuance, in its analysis of authors, texts, and ideas. The collection is concerned with the movement of people, texts, and ideas in the currents of transatlantic markets and politics, taking a fresh look at a range of canonical and popular writers of the period, including Austen, Poe, Crèvecoeur, Brockden Brown, Sedgwick, Hemans, Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, and Melville. In different ways, the essays gathered together here are concerned with the potentially empowering realities of the transitive, circulatory, and contingent experiences of transatlantic literary and cultural production as they are manifest in the long nineteenth century.

Some of the most celebrated poets of the Victorian era wrote about their pets, yet poems about pets have not received the kind of critical analysis devoted to fictional works and short stories - this book aims to remedy this omission.