Victorian Literature

by David Amigoni

Overview

How were the genres of literature changed by new methods of serialization and publishing? How did a widespread culture of performance emerge in the period to shape as well as to be shaped by the novel and poetry? David Amigoni draws on the most recent critical approaches to the novel, Victorian melodrama and poetry to answer these and other questions. The work of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Carlyle and Mathew Arnold are explored in relation to ideas about fiction, journalism, drama, poetry, the New Woman, gothic, horror and the Victorian sage.Key Features*Detailed readings of key texts provide models of how to read critically*Demonstrates the interaction between genres to help think through modes of artistic experimentation and innovation in the period*Examines Neo-Victorian fiction, a popular genre today*Student resources include electronic and reference sources, further reading and an extensive glossary of key critical terms and historical issues

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780748625635
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	03/23/2011
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David Amigoni is Professor of Victorian Literature at Keele University. He is the author of The English Novel and Prose Narrative (Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2000) and Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). He is co-editor, with Jeff Wallace, of Charles Darwin's 'Origin of Species': New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester UP, 1995), and co-editor, with Paul Barlow and Colin Trodd, of Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (Ashgate, 1999).

Table of Contents

Series Preface viii

Acknowledgements ix

Chronology x

Introduction to Victorian Literature: Perspectives, Relationships, Contexts 1

Generic Traffic in Strangely Modern Places: Locating the Victorians (again) 1

Observing 'Public Culture' in Mid-Victorian Britain: An Ant Colony, Ivy and Two Poets Named 'Alfred' 9

'Civilisation and its Discontents': Productivity, Power and Governance in Dickens's Hard Times 19

Concluding Summary 32

Chapter 1 Novel Sensations in Early and Mid-Victorian Fiction: From 'Boz' to Middlemarch 37

Dickens the Novelist, Dickens the Journalist: Modes of Publication, Sketches, and the Making of the Old Curiosity Shop 38

Moving Sensations: Performing the Old Curiosity Shop 45

The Novel at Mid-century: Forming a Victorian Canon 53

Fearful Sensations: The Woman in White 56

Variable Sensations of the Real: Middlemarch 62

Concluding Summary 70

Chapter 2 Theatrical Exchanges: Gendered Subjectivity and Identity Trials in the Dramatic Imagination 74

Locating, Regulating and Expanding the Effects of 'Theatricality' in Victorian Culture 75

Melodrama and Public History: The Sexualised Conflicts of Empire in Boucicault's Jessie Brown 85

Masculinity, Melodrama and Mind: The Frozen Deep 91

Earnest Laughter, Queer Laughter: Fictive, Multiple Identities in Farcical Dramas Dickens Wilde 96

Concluding Summary 104

Chapter 3 Poetry: Dramatic Monologues and Critical Dialogues 109

Voicing Sensation in Tennyson and Browning: The Dramatic Monologue and Cultural Debate 110

Controversies of Faith: Doubt, Evolution and Love in a Modern Age 118

Making Women's Voices: Fairy Tales, Christian Tales, Old Wives'Tales 131

Concluding Summary 143

Chapter 4 Victorians in Critical Time: Fin de Stècle and Sage-culture 147

Victorians at the End of Time: Thomas Hardy, New Women and Gothic Horrors at the Fin de Siècle 148

Feminist Critique and New Woman Fiction 154

Late Victorian Gothic Sensations 161

Victorian Sages in Critical Time: Carlyle and Arnold 165

Concluding Summary 171

Conclusion: Neo-Victorianism, Postmodernism and Underground Cultures 175

Student Resources 183

Electronic Resources and Reference Sources 183

Glossary 187

Guide to Further Reading 197

Index 206