The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to a thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics as well as essays on topics often overlooked.

Victorian England produces some the the greatest novelists in Western history, including Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot. Critical analysis focuses on the development of the Victorian novel through the second half of the 19th century.

Much has been written about the Victorian novel, and for good reason. The cultural power it exerted (and, to some extent, still exerts) is beyond question. The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to this thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics (the novel and science, the Victorian Bildungroman) as well as essays on topics often overlooked (the novel and classics, the novel and the OED, the novel, and allusion). Manifesting the increasing interdisciplinarity of Victorian studies, its essays situate the novel within a complex network of relations (among, for instance, readers, editors, reviewers, and the novelists themselves; or among different cultural pressures - the religious, the commercial, the legal). The handbook's essays also build on recent bibliographic work of remarkable scope and detail, responding to the growing attention to print culture. With a detailed introduction and 36 newly commissioned chapters by leading and emerging scholars -- beginning with Peter Garside's examination of the early nineteenth-century novel and ending with two essays proposing the 'last Victorian novel' -- the handbook attends to the major themes in Victorian scholarship while at the same time creating new possibilities for further research. Balancing breadth and depth, the clearly-written, nonjargon -laden essays provide readers with overviews as well as original scholarship, an approach which will serve advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars. As the Victorians get further away from us, our versions of their culture and its novel inevitably change; this Handbook offers fresh explorations of the novel that teach us about this genre, its culture, and, by extension, our own.

This 1996 book traces Dickens' interest in Shakespeare through his own reading and performance and through theatrical, literary and artistic sources.

A comprehensive analysis of the most important Shakespearean critics, editors, actors and directors. This volume focuses on Shakespeare's reception by major American writers and poets.

By examining the works of George Eliot, Carlyle, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George Meredith, George Gissing, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence, as well as several post-World War II novels, Argyle explores the Goethean ideal of Bildung and the Bildungsroman (self-culture and the apprenticeship novel), Heinrich Heine's anti-philistinism, music, the Tübingen higher criticism, Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's philosophies, Prussianism, and avant-garde culture in the Weimar Republic. To establish the status of these allusions in the public conversation, Argyle moves between literary and extra-literary contexts, including biographical material about the authors as well as information from contemporary literary works, periodical articles, and other documentation that indicates the understanding authors could assume from their readers. Her methodology combines theories of allusion and intertextuality with reception theory.

Renaissance of Classical Allusions in Contemporary Russian Media builds on a growing body of work concerning post-Soviet media culture during the last, transformative decade. Making sense of the literary allusions in media discourse, Svitlana Malykhina reminds us that allusions can serve as a primary marker of identity—national and cultural—and may also be a way of negotiating the gap between what has to be reported and what can be banned by censorship. Malykhina presents the changes and continuities between rhetoric strategies of Soviet-style media and postcommunist Russian media, identifying the key literary and historical references in public discourse, which are then picked up by the media. The book analyzes the political, cultural, and social factors at play in the development and expansion of these allusions in both official and alternative discourses. Examining the rise of the Internet, which has remained wholly uncensored in Russia, Malykhina reveals that the Russian Internet media began to function as alternative mass media. Yet, the success of the Internet media has also brought complex and unintended consequences. Malykhina offers an empirically rich examination of conventional classical allusions in media discourse, focusing mainly on the rhetorical techniques by which subversive meanings of these references were generated.