Lundin explores the contemporary response to the picture books of three pioneer Victorian illustrators of children's books: Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, and Kate Greenaway. Over a century after their first printing, the picture books are striking--breathtaking in their line, color, and design. The author frames "the horizons of expectation"--the context of assumptions and values--that shaped the way picture books were read and reviewed by their audience and examines their critical reception with a summary of their reputation over the last century. Finally, Lundin positions the three artists in relationship to each other and examines the historiography of the trio's canonization. The role of librarians, booksellers, and publishers was critical in making these names prominent through the twentieth century. The book illustrates that reputations are made, not born, and many cultural mediators are at work in the marketplace of children's literature.

A wonderfully wicked new anthology from the editor of The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime It is the Victorian era and society is both entranced by and fearful of that suspicious character known as the New Woman. She rides those new- fangled bicycles and doesn't like to be told what to do. And, in crime fiction, such female detectives as Loveday Brooke, Dorcas Dene, and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard are out there shadowing suspects, crawling through secret passages, fingerprinting corpses, and sometimes committing a lesser crime in order to solve a murder. In The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, Michael Sims has brought together all of the era's great crime-fighting females- plus a few choice crooks, including Four Square Jane and the Sorceress of the Strand.

Just as a traveler crossing a continent won’t sense the curvature of the earth, one lifetime of reading can’t grasp the largest patterns organizing literary history. This is the guiding premise behind Distant Horizons, which uses the scope of data newly available to us through digital libraries to tackle previously elusive questions about literature. Ted Underwood shows how digital archives and statistical tools, rather than reducing words to numbers (as is often feared), can deepen our understanding of issues that have always been central to humanistic inquiry. Without denying the usefulness of time-honored approaches like close reading, narratology, or genre studies, Underwood argues that we also need to read the larger arcs of literary change that have remained hidden from us by their sheer scale. Using both close and distant reading to trace the differentiation of genres, transformation of gender roles, and surprising persistence of aesthetic judgment, Underwood shows how digital methods can bring into focus the larger landscape of literary history and add to the beauty and complexity we value in literature.

Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

Victorian literature for audiences of all ages provides a broad foundation upon which to explore complex and evolving ideas about young people. In turn, this collection argues, contemporary works for young people that draw on Victorian literature and culture ultimately reflect our own disruptions and upheavals, particularly as they relate to child and adolescent readers and our experiences of them. The essays therein suggest that we struggle now, as the Victorians did then, to assert a cohesive understanding of young readers, and that this lack of cohesion is a result of or a parallel to the disruptions taking place on a larger (even global) scale.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Year An anthology featuring all-original tales of gaslamp fantasy from bestselling and award-winning authors including Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked. "Gaslamp Fantasy," or historical fantasy set in a magical version of the nineteenth century, has long been popular with readers and writers alike. A number of wonderful fantasy novels owe their inspiration to works by nineteenth-century writers ranging from Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Meredith to Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and William Morris. And, of course, the entire steampunk genre and subculture owes more than a little to literature inspired by this period. Queen Victoria's Book of Spells is an anthology for everyone who loves these works of neo-Victorian fiction, and wishes to explore the wide variety of ways that modern fantasists are using nineteenth-century settings, characters, and themes. These approaches stretch from steampunk fiction to the Austen-and-Trollope inspired works that some critics call Fantasy of Manners, all of which fit under the larger umbrella of Gaslamp Fantasy. The result is eighteen stories by experts from the fantasy, horror, mainstream, and young adult fields, including both bestselling writers and exciting new talents, who present a bewitching vision of a nineteenth century invested (or cursed!) with magic. Includes short stories by Delia Sherman, Jeffrey Ford, Genevieve Valentine, Maureen McHugh, Kathe Koja, Elizabeth Wein, Elizabeth Bear, James P. Blaylock, Kaaron Warren, Leanna Renee Hieber, Dale Bailey, Veronica Schanoes, Catherynne M. Valente, Ellen Kushner and Caroline Stevermer, Jane Yolen, Gregory Maguire, Tanith Lee, Theodora Goss. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

How did Victorian travellers define and challenge the notion of Empire? How did the multiple forms of Victorian travel literature, such as fiction, travel accounts, newspapers, and poetry, shape perceptions of imperial and national spaces, in the British context and beyond? This collection examines how, in the Victorian era, space and empire were shaped around the notion of boundaries, by travel narratives and practices, and from a variety of methodological and critical perspectives. From the travel writings of artists and polymaths such as Carmen Sylva and Richard Burton, to a reassessment of Rudyard Kipling’s, H. G. Wells’s and Julia Pardoe’s cross-cultural and cross-gender travels, this collection assesses a broad range of canonical and lesser-studied Victorian travel texts and genres, and evaluates the representation of empires, nations, and individual identity in travel accounts covering Europe, Asia, Africa and Britain.

Victorian Alphabet Books and the Education of the Eye shows how the familiar genre went beyond mere reading instruction to offer nineteenth-century British writers, illustrators, and publishers a site for representing and re-thinking literacy itself. This interdisciplinary study traces how individuals throughout the Victorian era deployed alphabet books to promote visual literacy or oral culture as a vital complement to textual literacy. Their strategies ranged from puns and political allusions to elaborate designs that addressed adult audiences alongside or even instead of children. As the format became more familiar in the first part of Victoria's reign, George Cruikshank, William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry Cole, and Edward Lear were quick to recognize its critical potential. This history pivots around the mid-1860s and 1870s, when the production of illustrated alphabet books exploded thanks to evolving printing technology and national education reform. Case studies of individual works and makers show how a revolution in picture books reflected and responded to laws assuring children's access to schooling. On the one hand, Socialist artist Walter Crane was able to develop alphabetical illustration from a utilitarian mid-century product into an aesthetically rich, yet accessibly priced "education of the eye." On the other hand, Kate Greenaway, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), and their publishers tended to leverage commercialized nostalgia against pedagogy. This survey concludes by showing how market-oriented trends and the development of photographic reproduction toward the end of the century fed into interpretations of the alphabet, including works by Rudyard Kipling and Hilaire Belloc, that reflected growing ambivalence about industrialized print culture.

Victorian literature for audiences of all ages provides a broad foundation upon which to explore complex and evolving ideas about young people. In turn, this collection argues, contemporary works for young people that draw on Victorian literature and culture ultimately reflect our own disruptions and upheavals, particularly as they relate to child and adolescent readers and our experiences of them. The essays therein suggest that we struggle now, as the Victorians did then, to assert a cohesive understanding of young readers, and that this lack of cohesion is a result of or a parallel to the disruptions taking place on a larger (even global) scale.