This book is about selected Victorian texts and authors that in many cases have never before been subject to sustained scholarly attention. Taking inspiration from the pioneeringly capacious approach to the hidden hinterland of Victorian fiction adopted by scholars like John Sutherland and Franco Moretti, this energetically revisionist volume takes advantage of recent large-scale digitisation projects that allow unprecedented access to hitherto neglected literary texts and archives. Blending lively critical engagement with individual texts and close attention to often surprising trends in the production and reception of prose fiction across the Victorian era, this book will be of use to anyone interested in re-evaluating the received meta-narratives of Victorian literary history. With an afterword by John Sutherland

This title was first published in 2002: A Poetics of Jesus explores the act of writing within and between the boundaries of 19th century biblical criticism and fiction. Reflecting on the work of Christian poetics after Augustine to Baur, Feuerbach, Friedrich Strauss and Victorian novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, this book breaks new ground in juxtaposing the evoked image of Christ arising from Victorian biblical criticism against the image of Christ within fiction, letting both these images and the words that figured them interact. This book offers a highly accessible introduction to 19th century literature and theology through comparisons made to contemporary post-modern theorists. Demonstrating how literature can inform theology without itself becoming 'theology', this book constitutes an important contribution to the literature/theology debate and a much needed contribution to contemporary Christology through its introduction to the literature and the writers central to the beginnings of the historical quest for Jesus.