A Companion to the Victorian Novel
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William Baker, Kenneth Womack
ISBN:
0-313-31407-1
ISBN-13:
978-0-313-31407-0
464 pages
Greenwood Press
Publication:
1/30/2002
Availability:
In Stock
Media Type:
Hardcover
Trim Size:
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects:
Description:
Victorian novels remain enormously popular today: some continue to be made into films, while authors such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot are firmly established in the canon and taught at all levels. These works have also attracted a great deal of critical attention, with much current scholarship examining the novel in relation to its historical, political, and cultural contexts. This reference book is an introductory guide to the Victorian novel, its background, and its legacy. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and offers a fresh account of past, current, and new directions in scholarship.
The volume is divided into several broad sections, with chapters in each section treating more specialized topics. The first section looks at the emergence of the Victorian novel and its literary precursors, with particular emphasis on the growth of serialization and the development of the novel of syndication. The second explores significant social and cultural facets of nineteenth-century British literature, while the third discusses the principal features of different genres, such as ghost stories, the Gothic, detective fiction, the social problem novel, and contemporary film adaptations. Individual authors are examined in the fourth section, while the fifth overviews various critical approaches and their application to nineteenth-century fiction.
Table of Contents:
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Preface
Victorian Literary Contexts
The Victorian Novel Emerges, 1800-1840 by Ian Duncan
Periodicals and Syndication by Graham Law
Book Publishing and the Victorian Literary Marketplace by Peter L. Shillingsburg
Victorian Illustrators and Illustration by Lynn Alexander
Victorian Cultural Contexts
The Nineteenth-Century Political Novel by Julian Wolfreys
The Sociological Contexts of Victorian Fiction by M. Claire Loughlin
Faith, Religion, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Nancy Cervetti
Philosophy and the Victorian Literary Aesthetic by Martin Bidney
Science and the Scientist in Victorian Fiction by Michael H. Whitworth
Law and the Victorian Novel by Elizabeth F. Judge
Intoxication and the Victorian Novel by Kathleen McCormack
Victorian Genres
Ghost and Hauntings in the Victorian Novel by Lucie J. Armitt
The Victorian Gothic by Peter Kitson
Victorian Detective Fiction by Lillian Nayder
The Victorian Social Problem Novel by James G. Nelson
The Victorian Sensation Novel by Helen Debenham
Victorian Juvenilia by Christine Alexander
Moving Pictures: Film and the Representation of Victorian Fictions by Todd F. Davis
Major Authors of the Victorian Era
Religion in the Novels of Charlotte and Anne Brontë by Marianne Thormählen
Victorian Professionalism and Charlotte Brontë's Villette by Roger Poole
Charles Dickens by K.J. Fielding
George Eliot: Critical Responses to Daniel Deronda by Nancy Henry
George Eliot's Reading Revolution and the Mythical School of Criticism by William R. McKelvy
Thomas Hardy by Edward Neill
The Vanities of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair by Juliet McMaster
Anthony Trollope and "Classic Realism" by K.M. Newton
George Meredith at the Crossways by Margaret Harris
"Not Burying the One Talent": Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Duty by Barbara Quinn Schmidt
Wilkie Collins's Challenges to Pre-Raphaelite Gender Constructs by Sophia Andres
Contemporary Critical Approaches to the Victorian Novel
Postcolonial Readings by Roslyn Jolly
Feminist Criticism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Eileen Gillooly
Otherness and Identity in the Victorian Novel by Michael Galchinsky
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Author:
WILLIAM BAKER is Professor, Department of English, and Professor, University Libraries, at Northern Illinois University. He is the Editor of George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, as well as the author or editor of such volumes as Harold Pinter (1973), George Eliot and Judaism (1975), The Libraries of George Eliot and G. H. Lewes (1981), F.R. Leavis and Q.D. Leavis: An Annotated Bibliography (1989), The Early History of the London Library (1992), The Letters of George Henry Lewes (1995, 1999), Literary Theories: A Case Study in Critical Performance (1996), and The Letters of Wilkie Collins (1999).
KENNETH WOMACK is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Altoona. In addition to coauthoring Recent Work in Critical Theory, 1989-1995: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood, 1996) and Twentieth-Century Bibliography and Textual Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood, 2000), and coediting the Dictionary of Literary Biography's three-volume British Book Collectors and Bibliographers series (1997-1999), he has published numerous articles on twentieth-century British and American literature and film. He is editor of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory, correspondent for the World Shakespeare Bibliography, and associate editor of George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies.
LCC Class:
823
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