"This collection is... a lesson to editors about how different types of subjects may profitably be brought together in one volume. And though the feminist orientation is provocative, there is a complete absence of any tone of vindictiveness, and an obvious determination to get at the truth."--Eugene Kraft, "English Literature in Transition."

Six critics consider what is significantly not present or at least significantly well hidden in a provocative examination of the cultural anxieties that the nineteenth-century novel manipulates and conceals. Probing the connections between literary and sexual politics, the authors question the absence of the police from Barchester Towers and the presence of homoeroticism in "The Beast in the Jungle." They consider the Victorian's sharpened sense of their own evanescence and the fin de siècle's fevered preoccupation with syphilis, the terror of "women people" in the naturalist novel, and the anxious connection between female authorship and prostitution in George Eliot. Throughout, they explore the ways in which the novel participates in society; Trollope and James are discussed alongside not only George Eliot and Hardy, Bram Stoker, and James Barrie but also nuneteenth-century economists and evolutionary biologists, with psychiatrists, sociologists, and even obstetricians.

This book includes essays on writers from the 1840s to the 1890s, well known writers such as Anne Bronte, Wilkie Collins and Bram Stoker, lesser known writers such as Geraldine Jewsbury, Charles Reade, Margaret Oliphant, George Moore, Sarah Grand and Mary Ward. The contributors explore important thematic concerns: the relation between private and public realms; gender and social class; sexuality and the marketplace; and male and female cultural identity.

Presents an introduction to Victorian sexualities. This book contains essays that will energize reflection on the complexity of human sexuality and on the many different arrays of meaning that it has generated.

Exploring a range of early nineteenth-century cultural materials from canonical poetry and critical prose to women's magazines and gift-book engravings, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author offers new perspectives on the role of gender in Romanticism's defining paradigms of authorship. The Romantic author's claim to individual agency is complicated by its articulation in a market system perceived to be impelled in large part by fantasies of female desire - by what women read and write, what they buy and sell, how they look, and where they look for pleasure. These studies in the contested public spaces of literary labour elaborate the fundamental, if invisible, function of the woman as embodiment of authorial ambivalence in writing by Austen, Byron, Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Sarah Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Keats, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and others.

2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title Marcie Frank’s study traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel, offering a dramatic new approach to the history of the English novel that examines how the collaboration of genres contributed to the novel’s narrative form and to the modern organization of literature. Drawing on media theory and focusing on the less-examined narrative contributions of such authors as Aphra Behn, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, alongside those of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen, The Novel Stage tells the story of the novel as it was shaped by the stage. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Annotation Why were the Victorians so passionate about 'history'? How did this passion relate to another Victorian obsession - the 'woman question'? Christina Crosby investigates the links between the Victorians' fascination with 'history' and with the nature of 'women'.

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual features the year’s best scholarship on this major literary figure.

A NEW COMPANION TO VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE The Victorian period was a time of rapid cultural change, which resulted in a huge and varied literary output. A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture offers experienced guidance to the literature of nineteenth-century Britain and its social and historical context. This revised and expanded edition comprises contributions from over 30 leading scholars who, approaching the Victorian epoch from different positions and traditions, delve into the unruly complexities of the Victorian imagination. Divided into five parts, this new Companion surveys seven decades of history before examining the key phases in a Victorian life, the leading professions and walks of life, the major literary genres, the way Victorians defined their persons, homes, and national identity, and how recent “neo-Victorian” developments in contemporary culture reconfigure the sense we make of the past today. Important topics such as sexuality, denominational faith, social class, and global empire inform each chapter’s approach. Each chapter provides a comprehensive bibliography of established and emerging scholarship.