In the first half of the nineteenth century autobiography became, for the first time, an explicitly commercial genre. Drawing together quantitative data on the Victorian book market, insights from the business ledgers of Victorian publishers and close readings of mid-century novels, Sean Grass demonstrates the close links between these genres and broader Victorian textual and material cultures. This book offers fresh perspectives on major works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, while also featuring archival research that reveals the volume, diversity, and marketability of Victorian autobiographical texts for the first time. Grass presents life-writing not as a stand-alone genre, but as an integral part of a broader movement of literary, cultural, legal and economic practices through which the Victorians transformed identity into a textual object of capitalist exchange.

A new edition of this standard work, fully updated with four brand new chapters.

Views the Victorian novel through the prism of literary imitations that it inspired.

An exploration of the commodification of autobiography 1820-1860 in relation to shifting fictional representations of identity.

Explores the journalism and fiction appearing in the early Victorian working-class periodical press and its influence on mainstream literature.

This literary and cultural study explores the practice in nineteenth-century Britain of treasuring objects that had belonged to the dead.

Study of malaria in literature and culture illuminates the legacies of nineteenth-century colonial medicine within narratives of illness.

Argues that novelists graft aging onto narrative duration and reveals the politics of senescence in nineteenth and early-twentieth century plots.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

An interdisciplinary study that explores the impact of evolutionary theory on Victorian children's literature.