Offering an in-depth overview and reappraisal of the 1860s in British literature, this innovative volume features in-depth analyses from noted scholars at the tops of their fields. Covering characteristic literary genres of the 1860s (including sensation and lyric, as well as Golden Age children's literature), and topics of current and enduring interest in the field, from empire and slavery to evolution, environmental issues and economics, it incorporates drama as well as poetry and fiction, and emphasizes the history of publishing and periodicals so important to the period. Chapters are attentive to the global context, from Ireland on the stage, to Bengali literature, to Britain's muted response to the US Civil War. The Introduction gives an overview that places these individual chapters in the historical context of the 1860s, as well as the current scholarly conversation in the field.
The 1890s were once seen as marginal within the larger field of Victorian studies, which tended to privilege the realist novel and the authors of the mid-century. In recent decades, the fin de siècle has come to be viewed as one of the most dynamic decades of the Victorian era. Viewed by writers and artists of the period as a moment of opportunity, transition, and urgency, the 1890s are pivotal for understanding the parameters of the field of Victorian studies itself. This volume makes a case for why the decade continues to be an area of perennial fascination, focusing on transnational connections, gender and sexuality, ecological concerns, technological innovations, and other current critical trends. This collection both calls attention to the diverse range of literature and art being produced during this period and foregrounds the relevance of the Victorian era's final years to issues and crises that face us today.
In a remarkable literary career, Andrew Lang challenged the increasing specialism that accompanied the advance of modernity and science in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, authoring an extraordinary body of rigorous, scholarly works in the fields of social anthropology, folklore, Homeric studies, history, and religion, while simultaneously turning out novels, poems for periodicals, and inexhaustible columns of prose journalism to make money. He was widely regarded as one of the most influential men of letters and reviewers of his day. He was a founding member and later President of the Folklore Society, and, with his wife, helped transform the taste in children's literature with their anthologized fairy stories for young people. G. K. Chesterton, paying tribute on Lang's death in 1912 to the scale and diversity of his legacy to the humanities, compared him to a 'kind of Indian god with a hundred hands'. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished correspondence and new sources of information, this first full biography of Lang documents in compelling detail his double existence as a scholar and journalist, the intellectual impact of his cross-disciplinary approach to learning and writing, and the critical controversies he courted as a writer and thinker to advance knowledge in the human sciences. The book also throws new light on Lang's personal life: on the uncomfortable legacy of his grandfather, whose notorious part in the Sutherland Clearances earlier in the century left its mark on the family; on the enduring influence on him of his early Scottish education and its generalist traditions of learning; and on his friendships with fellow writers, among them Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Rider Haggard, Edmund Gosse, Rhoda Broughton, and William Henley. The result is a fascinating portrait of a man who lived one of the most productive lives in literature, sought to make knowledge available to everyone, and bridged, as no other, the university and the literary world, the proverbial 'Grub Street and the ivory tower'.
This book addresses the evident but unexplored intertwining of visibility and invisibility in the discourses around syphilis. A rethinking of the disease with reference to its ambiguous status, and the ways of seeing that it generated, helps reconsider the network of socio-cultural and political interrelations which were negotiated through syphilis, thereby also raising larger questions about its function in the construction of individual, national and imperial identities. This book is the first large-scale interdisciplinary study of syphilis in late Victorian Britain whose significance lies in its unprecedented attention to the multimedia and multi-discursive evocations of syphilis. An examination of the heterogeneous sources that it offers, many of which have up to this point escaped critical attention, makes it possible to reveal the complex and poly-ideological reasons for the activation of syphilis imagery and its symbolic function in late Victorian culture.
Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life casts new light on nineteenth-century poetry by examining the period through its popular verse forms and their surrounding social and media landscape. The volume offers insight into two central concepts of both the Victorian era and our own—status and taste—and how cultural hierarchies then and now were and are constructed and broken. By recovering the lost diversity of Victorian verse, the book maps the breadth of Victorian writing and reading practices, illustrating how these seemingly minor verse genres actually possessed crucial social functions for Victorians, particularly in education, leisure practices, the cultural production of class, and the formation of individual and communal identities. The essays consider how “major” Victorian poets, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, were also committed to writing and reading “minor” verse, further troubling the clear-cut notions of canonicity by examining the contradictions of value.
Ireland's experience in the nineteenth century was quite different from that of Victorian Britain. Its fictions were written in differing forms - like the gothic or historical novel - and its poetry and drama were populated with ballad and song. Its writers were by turns nationalist or unionist, anglophile or de-anglicising. If the effects of Famine and emigration were catastrophic for mid-nineteenth-century Irish culture, they initiated a literary story that spread across the diaspora. Despite the decline of spoken Irish, literature continued to be published, while scholarly endeavours such as translation or the Ordnance Survey preserved much from the Gaelic past. This rich volume examines the many forms of new writing that thrived throughout this period. Utilizing a thematic and historical approach, it addresses a broad anglophone readership in Victorian literature. Essays consider the Irish authors in America and India, women's writing, and the resilience of Irish literature before the revival.