La jaquette indique : "In 1836 John Wilson Croker, having immersed himself in dozens of contemporary French novels, warned that 'she who dares to read a single page of the hundred thousand licentious pages with which the last five years have indundated society, is lost for ever.' Many readers, both then and during the following decades, were nonetheless willing to take the risk. it has become common to oppose prudish Victorian England with permissive nineteenth-century France, but the extent to which Gallic literature was rejected has been greatly exaggerated. French Novels and the Victorians sets out to trace the fortunes of French fiction in England between 1830 and 1870. The book explores the institutions, businesses, publications and networks that enabled French novels to cross the Channel and reach British hands. The works' dissemination was sufficiently extensive to cause alarm, and the notion of their immorality was subjected to scrutiny in transnational critical discussions, readers' responses, censorship debates and fictional representations. the impact of French novels was, however, by no means considered simply in moral terms, but also in literary and even commercial ones, as the pervasiveness of these imports challenged the boundaries and identity of England's national literature. In addition to assessing the cultural importance of novelests such as Balzac, Dumas, Dumas fils, Hugo, Sans and Sue, and recovering the significance of currently neglected writers sur as Paul de Kock, French novels and the Victorians seeks to investigate how critics, novelists, and readers elaborated and responded to the concept of 'the French novel'."

In 1836, John Wilson Croker, having immersed himself in dozens of contemporary French novels, warned his readers that 'she who dares to read a single page of the hundred thousand licentious pages with which the last five years have indundated society, is lost for ever.' It has become common to build an opposition between the attitudes towards fiction held in prudish Victorian England and permissive 19th-century France. The lack of a full-length study of 19th-century Anglo-French literary relations means, however, that the rejection of French novels has been greatly exaggerated. French Novels and the Victorians sheds new light on these relations by exploring the enormous impact of French fiction on the Victorian reading public. The book considers the many different ties built between the two countries in the publishing industry, identifying how French novels could be accessed and by whom, as well as who promoted and who resisted the importation of Continental works in England and why. The book reflects on what 'immorality' meant to both critics and the readers they sought to warn, and how the notion was subjected to scrutiny through censorship debates as well as the fictional representations of readers. It also tackles the contemporary preoccupation with literary influence, and explores how the extensive circulation of French fiction in England affected the concept of a 'national' literature.

Mastering the Marketplace examines the origins of modern mass-media culture through developments in the new literary marketplace of nineteenth-century France and how literature itself reveals the broader social and material conditions in which it is produced. Anne O’Neil-Henry examines how French authors of the nineteenth century navigated the growing publishing and marketing industry, as well as the dramatic rise in literacy rates, libraries, reading rooms, literary journals, political newspapers, and the advent of the serial novel. O’Neil-Henry places the work of canonical author Honoré de Balzac alongside then-popular writers such as Paul de Kock and Eugène Sue, acknowledging the importance of “low” authors in the wider literary tradition. By reading literary texts alongside associated advertisements, book reviews, publication histories, sales tactics, and promotional tools, O’Neil-Henry presents a nuanced picture of the relationship between “high” and “low” literature, one in which critics and authors alike grappled with the common problem of commercial versus cultural capital. Through new literary readings and original archival research from holdings in the United States and France, O’Neil-Henry revises existing understandings of a crucial moment in the development of industrialized culture. In the process, she discloses links between this formative period and our own, in which mobile electronic devices, internet-based bookstores, and massive publishing conglomerates alter—once again—the way literature is written, sold, and read.

In Victorian Skin, Pamela K. Gilbert uses literary, philosophical, medical, and scientific discourses about skin to trace the development of a broader discussion of what it meant to be human in the nineteenth century. Where is subjectivity located? How do we communicate with and understand each other's feelings? How does our surface, which contains us and presents us to others, function and what does it signify? As Gilbert shows, for Victorians, the skin was a text to be read. Nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical perspectives had reconfigured the purpose and meaning of this organ as more than a wrapping and instead a membrane integral to the generation of the self. Victorian writers embraced this complex perspective on skin even as sanitary writings focused on the surface of the body as a dangerous point of contact between self and others. Drawing on novels and stories by Dickens, Collins, Hardy, and Wilde, among others, along with their French contemporaries and precursors among the eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers and German idealists, Gilbert examines the understandings and representations of skin in four categories: as a surface for the sensing and expressive self; as a permeable boundary; as an alienable substance; and as the site of inherent and inscribed properties. At the same time, Gilbert connects the ways in which Victorians "read" skin to the way in which Victorian readers (and subsequent literary critics) read works of literature and historical events (especially the French Revolution.) From blushing and flaying to scarring and tattooing, Victorian Skin tracks the fraught relationship between ourselves and our skin.

Criticism about the neo-Victorian novel — a genre of historical fiction that re-imagines aspects of the Victorian world from present-day perspectives — has expanded rapidly in the last fifteen years but given little attention to the engagement between science and religion. Of great interest to Victorians, this subject often appears in neo-Victorian novels including those by such well-known authors as John Fowles, A. S. Byatt, Graham Swift, and Mathew Kneale. This book discusses novels in which nineteenth-century science, including geology, paleontology, and evolutionary theory, interacts with religion through accommodations, conflicts, and crises of faith. In general, these texts abandon conventional religion but retain the ethical connectedness and celebration of life associated with spirituality at its best. Registering the growth of nineteenth-century secularism and drawing on aspects of the romantic tradition and ecological thinking, they honor the natural world without imagining that it exists for humans or functions in reference to human values. In particular, they enact a form of wonderment: the capacity of the mind to make sense of, creatively adapt, and enjoy the world out of which it has evolved — in short, to endow it with meaning. Protagonists who come to experience reality in this expansive way release themselves from self-anxiety and alienation. In this book, Glendening shows how, by intermixing past and present, fact and fiction, neo-Victorian narratives, with a few instructive exceptions, manifest this pattern.

Working Fictions takes as its point of departure the common and painful truth that the vast majority of human beings toil for a wage and rarely for their own enjoyment or satisfaction. In this striking reconceptualization of Victorian literary history, Carolyn Lesjak interrogates the relationship between labor and pleasure, two concepts that were central to the Victorian imagination and the literary output of the era. Through the creation of a new genealogy of the “labor novel,” Lesjak challenges the prevailing assumption about the portrayal of work in Victorian fiction, namely that it disappears with the fall from prominence of the industrial novel. She proposes that the “problematic of labor” persists throughout the nineteenth century and continues to animate texts as diverse as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, George Eliot’s Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and the essays and literary work of William Morris and Oscar Wilde. Lesjak demonstrates how the ideological work of the literature of the Victorian era, the “golden age of the novel,” revolved around separating the domains of labor and pleasure and emphasizing the latter as the proper realm of literary representation. She reveals how the utopian works of Morris and Wilde grapple with this divide and attempt to imagine new relationships between work and pleasure, relationships that might enable a future in which work is not the antithesis of pleasure. In Working Fictions, Lesjak argues for the contemporary relevance of the “labor novel,” suggesting that within its pages lie resources with which to confront the gulf between work and pleasure that continues to characterize our world today.

What happens to our understanding of 'orientalism' and imperialism when we consider British-Chinese relations during the nineteenth century, rather than focusing on India, Africa or the Caribbean? This book explores China's centrality to British imperial aspirations and literary production, underscoring the heterogeneous, interconnected nature of Britain's formal and informal empire. To British eyes, China promised unlimited economic possibilities, but also posed an ominous threat to global hegemony. Surveying anglophone literary production about China across high and low cultures, as well as across time, space and genres, this book demonstrates how important location was to the production, circulation and reception of received ideas about China and the Chinese. In this account, treaty ports matter more than opium. Ross G. Forman challenges our preconceptions about British imperialism, reconceptualizes anglophone literary production in the global and local contexts, and excavates the little-known Victorian history so germane to contemporary debates about China's 'rise'.

The reimagining of Jane Eyre as a gutsy, heroic serial killer that The New York Times Book Review calls “wonderfully entertaining” and USA Today describes as “sheer mayhem meets Victorian propriety”—nominated for the 2017 Edgar Award for Best Novel. “Reader, I murdered him.” A sensitive orphan, Jane Steele suffers first at the hands of her spiteful aunt and predatory cousin, then at a grim school where she fights for her very life until escaping to London, leaving the corpses of her tormentors behind her. After years of hiding from the law while penning macabre “last confessions” of the recently hanged, Jane thrills at discovering an advertisement. Her aunt has died and her childhood home has a new master: Mr. Charles Thornfield, who seeks a governess. Burning to know whether she is in fact the rightful heir, Jane takes the position incognito and learns that Highgate House is full of marvelously strange new residents—the fascinating but caustic Mr. Thornfield, an army doctor returned from the Sikh Wars, and the gracious Sikh butler Mr. Sardar Singh, whose history with Mr. Thornfield appears far deeper and darker than they pretend. As Jane catches ominous glimpses of the pair’s violent history and falls in love with the gruffly tragic Mr. Thornfield, she faces a terrible dilemma: Can she possess him—body, soul, and secrets—without revealing her own murderous past? “A thrill ride of a novel. A must read for lovers of Jane Eyre, dark humor, and mystery.”—PopSugar.com

What if we didn't always historicize when we read Victorian fiction? Lost Causes shows that Victorian writers frequently appear to have a more supple and interesting understanding of the relationship between history, causality, and narrative than the one typically offered by readers who are burdened by the new historicism. As a return to these writers emphasizes, the press of modern historicism deforms Victorian novels, encouraging us to read deviations from strict historical accuracy as ideological bad faith. By contrast, Jason B. Jones argues through readings of works ranging from The French Revolution to Middlemarch that literature's engagement with history has to be read otherwise. Perhaps perversely, Lost Causes suggests simultaneously that psychoanalysis speaks pressingly to the vexed relationship between history and narrative, and that the theory is neither a- nor anti-historical. Through his readings of Victorian fiction addressing the recent past, Jones finds in psychoanalysis not a set of truths, but rather a method for rhetorical reading, ultimately revealing how its troubled account of psychic causality can help us follow literary language's representation of the real. Victorian narratives of the recent past and psychoanalytic interpretation share a fascination with effects that persist despite baffling, inexplicable, or absent causes. In chapters focusing on Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, Lost Causes demonstrates that history can carry an ontological, as well as an epistemological, charge--one that suggests a condition of being in the world as well as a way of knowing the world as it really is. From this point of view, Victorian fiction that addresses the recent past is not a failed realism, as it is so frequently claimed, but rather an exploration of possibility in history.