"By comparing 'ideologies surrounding women and books' on both sides of the Atlantic, it offers new interpretations of canonical texts in a series of fascinating pairings of British and American texts. . . . The most original aspect of the book is its examination of the woman reader as she appeared in illustrations in popular novels and the way illustration functioned as 'a vehicle for illuminating issues of gender.'"--Emma Liggins, coeditor of Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts, Edge Hill College of Higher Education, Lancashire, U.K. "Argues persuasively that female reading practice was highly varied and hotly contested in this period and that this fact gave rise to a wide range of artistic representations. By examining visual as well as verbal material, she distinguishes her analysis and appeals to a wide scholarly audience."--Linda J. Docherty, Bowdoin College For Victorian women, danger lurked between the covers of a book. In an exploration of this controversial notion, Catherine Golden examines women and reading in literary and visual representations in Britain and America. Illustrated with 42 pictures by popular and renowned artists of the era, her book vividly brings to life the world of the 19th- and early 20th-century female reader. While industrialization was transforming print culture, Victorian women on both sides of the Atlantic made great strides in education, and reading came to be seen as a mark of gentility and a means to promote family unity. But at the same time, a perceived association between excessive novel reading and ill health raised alarm: the prospect of unchecked reading coupled with an overactive imagination led critics to debate if, what, when, where, and why middle- and upper-class women should read. Golden presents a concise historical framework of the topic and examines how authors and illustrators responded to the arguments for and against women's reading. She discusses heroines in both popular and intellectual works by writers such as Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Henry James, and depictions of the woman reader by prominent illustrators such as George Cruikshank, Jessie Willcox Smith, and Hablot Knight Browne. She also includes biographies of both authors and illustrators and analyzes how they used reading as a literary, expressive, or political device. With its focus on the power of reading and of book illustration as well as its attention to primary materials and gender issues and its discussion of texts widely used in college teaching, this book will be valuable across a range of disciplines that include literature, history, art history, women's studies, and the study of the book. Catherine J. Golden, professor of English at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, is the editor or coeditor of four books, most recently The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Text, Image, and Culture, 1770-1930.

"By comparing 'ideologies surrounding women and books' on both sides of the Atlantic, it offers new interpretations of canonical texts in a series of fascinating pairings of British and American texts. . . . The most original aspect of the book is its examination of the woman reader as she appeared in illustrations in popular novels and the way illustration functioned as 'a vehicle for illuminating issues of gender.'"--Emma Liggins, coeditor of Feminist Readings of Victorian Popular Texts, Edge Hill College of Higher Education, Lancashire, U.K. "Argues persuasively that female reading practice was highly varied and hotly contested in this period and that this fact gave rise to a wide range of artistic representations. By examining visual as well as verbal material, she distinguishes her analysis and appeals to a wide scholarly audience."--Linda J. Docherty, Bowdoin College For Victorian women, danger lurked between the covers of a book. In an exploration of this controversial notion, Catherine Golden examines women and reading in literary and visual representations in Britain and America. Illustrated with 42 pictures by popular and renowned artists of the era, her book vividly brings to life the world of the 19th- and early 20th-century female reader. While industrialization was transforming print culture, Victorian women on both sides of the Atlantic made great strides in education, and reading came to be seen as a mark of gentility and a means to promote family unity. But at the same time, a perceived association between excessive novel reading and ill health raised alarm: the prospect of unchecked reading coupled with an overactive imagination led critics to debate if, what, when, where, and why middle- and upper-class women should read. Golden presents a concise historical framework of the topic and examines how authors and illustrators responded to the arguments for and against women's reading. She discusses heroines in both popular and intellectual works by writers such as Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Henry James, and depictions of the woman reader by prominent illustrators such as George Cruikshank, Jessie Willcox Smith, and Hablot Knight Browne. She also includes biographies of both authors and illustrators and analyzes how they used reading as a literary, expressive, or political device. With its focus on the power of reading and of book illustration as well as its attention to primary materials and gender issues and its discussion of texts widely used in college teaching, this book will be valuable across a range of disciplines that include literature, history, art history, women's studies, and the study of the book. Catherine J. Golden, professor of English at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, is the editor or coeditor of four books, most recently The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Text, Image, and Culture, 1770-1930.

The Victorian illustrated book came into being, flourished, and evolved during the long nineteenth century. While existing scholarship on Victorian illustrators largely centers on the realist artists of the "Sixties," this volume examines the entire lifetime of the Victorian illustrated book. Catherine Golden offers a new framework for viewing the arc of this vibrant genre, arguing that it arose from and continually built on the creative vision of the caricature-style illustrators of the 1830s. She surveys the fluidity of illustration styles across serial installments, British and American periodicals, adult and children’s literature, and--more recently--graphic novels. Serials to Graphic Novels examines widely recognized illustrated texts, such as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Rabbit, and Trilby. Golden explores factors that contributed to the early popularity of the illustrated book—the growth of commodity culture, a rise in literacy, new printing technologies—and that ultimately created a mass market for illustrated fiction. Golden identifies present-day visual adaptations of the works of Austen, Dickens, and Trollope as well as original Neo-Victorian graphic novels like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Victorian-themed novels like Batman: Noël as the heirs to the Victorian illustrated book. With these adaptations and additions, the Victorian canon has been refashioned and repurposed visually for new generations of readers.

In the nineteenth century, no assumption about female reading generated more ambivalence than the supposedly feminine facility for identifying with fictional characters. The belief that women were more impressionable than men inspired a continuous stream of anxious rhetoric about “female quixotes”: women who would imitate inappropriate characters or apply incongruous frames of reference from literature to their own lives. While the overt cultural discourse portrayed female literary identification as passive and delusional, Palacios Knox reveals increasing accounts of Victorian women wielding literary identification as a deliberate strategy. Wayward women readers challenged dominant assumptions about “feminine reading” and, by extension, femininity itself. Victorian Women and Wayward Reading contextualizes crises about female identification as reactions to decisive changes in the legal, political, educational, and professional status of women over the course of the nineteenth century: changes that wayward reading helped women first to imagine and then to enact.

Explores what and how women of widely differing cultures have read through the ages, from Cro-Magnon caves to the digital readers of today, drawing distinctions between male and female readers and detailing how female literacy has been suppressed in some parts of the world.

Since the establishment of sensation fiction in the 1860s, key trends have emerged in critical readings of these texts. From Victorian responses emphasising the 'lowbrow' or potentially dangerous qualities of the genre to the prolific critical attention of the present day, this Reader's Guide identifies the dominant approaches to sensation fiction and charts the critical trends of various scholarly evaluations and interpretations. With coverage spanning empire, class, sexuality and adaptation, this is the ideal companion for students of Victorian Literature looking for an introduction to the key debates surrounding sensation fiction.

Women's Literary Portraits in the Victorian and Neo-Victorian Novel is a dialogical and intertextual journey through the pages of nineteenth-century novels and their modern, revisionary counterparts. It is the book not only dedicated to the readers associated with academia, but also to all literature enthusiasts, students of literature, and those readers who are fascinated by the Victorian novel, as well as by its current neo-Victorian revival. The focus of this work revolves around the literary portrayals of Victorian and neo-Victorian women who, as the authoress believes, are located in the centre of socio-cultural and historical narratives shaping both the past and the present. Nineteenth-century narratives concerning women's placement and status in the Victorian social landscape are currently revived on the pages of neo-Victorian novels, thus attesting to the unceasing interest in the bygone. While neo-Victorian revisionary fiction endows nineteenth-century women with a redemptive potential, it also exposes modern paradoxes and ambiguities connected with universal expectations towards women, what further approximates our contemporaneity to the Victorian past. While examining these socio-cultural ambivalences, the authoress celebrates Victorian and neo-Victorian women characters in their attempts to thrive as individuals. Consequently, the book studies Victorian and neo-Victorian women characters in relation to their identities, unique voices and textual garments.

"Wildly popular with Victorian readers, sensation fiction was condemned by most critics for scandalous content and formal features that deviated from respectable Victorian realism. Victorian Sensations is the first collection to examine sensation fiction as a whole, showing it to push genre boundaries and resist easy classification. Comprehensive in scope, this collection includes twenty original essays employing various critical approaches to cover a range of topics that will interest many readers." "Essays are organized thematically into three sections: issues of genre; sensational representations of gender and sexuality; and the texts' complex readings of diverse social and cultural phenomena such as class, race, and empire. The introduction reviews the critical reception of sensation fiction to situate these new essays within a larger scholarly context."--BOOK JACKET.

This collection of published papers on the development of the publishing cycle from author to reader includes work by many of the leading authorities on the history of the book in the nineteenth century, including James Barnes, Simon Eliot, Kate Flint, Elizabeth McHenry, Robert Patten, David Vincent and Ronald Zboray. It contains examples of different approaches, reflecting the fact that scholars come from a variety of disciplinary traditions, such as bibliography, typography, literary studies, library studies and the history of science. The introduction provides an overview of both the historical context and recent work on the subject. The volume is divided into five sections: National Publishing Structures in America, France, and Russia; International Trade; Publishing Practices; Distribution; Reading. The collection includes work in the tradition of French book history which has focussed on the systems and structures of the publishing industry and Anglo-American book history characterised by detailed analyses of the publication of a specific title or the practices of an individual reader.

This collection of essays examines the various social, cultural and historical contexts surrounding Edith Wharton's popular and prolific literary career.