Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century


Book Description

The handbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the British novel in the long eighteenth century, when this genre emerged to develop into the period’s most versatile and popular literary form. Part I features six systematic chapters that discuss literary, intellectual, socio-economic, and political contexts, providing innovative approaches to issues such as sense and sentiment, gender considerations, formal characteristics, economic history, enlightened and radical concepts of citizenship and human rights, ecological ramifications, and Britain’s growing global involvement. Part II presents twenty-five analytical chapters that attend to individual novels, some canonical and others recently recovered. These analyses engage the debates outlined in the systematic chapters, undertaking in-depth readings that both contextualize the works and draw on relevant criticism, literary theory, and cultural perspectives. The handbook’s breadth and depth, clear presentation, and lucid language make it attractive and accessible to scholar and student alike.




Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children's Literature


Book Description

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




Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel


Book Description

This interdisciplinary study examines how holistic aftercare became a crucial supplement to scientific medicine in nineteenth-century Britain.




Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel


Book Description

An examination of how four industrial-age novelists confronted crises at new and unprecedented temporal, ecological and geographical scales.




Postcolonial George Eliot


Book Description

This book examines the range of the colonial imaginary in Eliot’s works, from the domestic and regional to ancient and speculative colonialisms. It challenges monolithic, hegemonic views of George Eliot — whose novelistic career paralleled the creation of British India — and also dismissals of the postcolonial as ahistorical. It uncovers often-overlooked colonized figures in the novels. It also investigates Victorian Islamophobia in light of Eliot’s impatience with ignorance, intolerance, and xenophobia as well as her interrogation of the make-believe of endings. Drawing on a range of sources from Eugène Bodichon’s Algerian anthropological texts, the Persian journals of John Martyn, and postmodern re-engagements, Postcolonial George Eliot has implications for an understanding of the globalization of English, the decolonization of disciplinarity and periodization, and the roots of present-day conflict in the wider Mediterranean world.




Aging, Duration, and the English Novel


Book Description

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




Cultivating Belief


Book Description

This book explores how a group of Victorian liberal writers that included George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Matthew Arnold became attracted to new theories of religion as a function of race and ethnicity. Since the early modern period, British liberals had typically constructed religion as a zone of personal belief that defined modern individuality and interiority. During the 1860s, however, Eliot, Arnold, and other literary liberals began to claim that religion could actually do the most for the modern self when it came as a kind of involuntary inheritance. Stimulated by the emerging science of anthropology, they imagined that religious experiences embedded in race or ethnicity could render the self heterogeneous, while the individual who insisted upon selecting his or her own beliefs would become narrow and parochial. By rethinking the grounds of religion, this book argues, these writers were ultimately trying to shift liberal individualism away from a classical Protestant liberalism that celebrated interiority and agency and toward one that valorized eclecticism and the capacity to keep multiple values in play. More broadly, their work offers us a new picture of secularization, not as a process of religious decline, but as the reinscription of religion as an ordinary feature of human life—like art, or politics, or sex—whose function could be debated.




Reforming Trollope


Book Description

Trollope the reformer and the reformation of Trollope scholarship in relation to gender, race, and genre are the intertwined subjects of eminent Trollopian Deborah Denenholz Morse’s radical rethinking of Anthony Trollope. Beginning with a history of Trollope’s critical reception, Morse traces the ways in which Trollope’s responses to the political and social upheavals of the 1860s and 1870s are reflected in his novels. She argues that as Trollope’s ideas about gender and race evolved over those two crucial decades, his politics became more liberal. The first section of the book analyzes these changes in terms of genre. As Morse shows, the novelist subverts and modernizes the quintessential English genre of the pastoral in the wake of Darwin in the early 1860s novel The Small House at Allington. Following the Second Reform Act, he reimagines the marriage plot along new class lines in the early 1870s in Lady Anna. The second section focuses upon gender. In the wake of the Second Reform Bill and the agitations for women's rights in the 1860s and 1870s, Trollope reveals the tragedy of primogeniture and male privilege in Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite and the viciousness of the marriage market in Ayala's Angel. The final section of Reforming Trollope centers upon race. Trollope's response to the Jamaica Rebellion and the ensuing Governor Eyre Controversy in England is revealed in the tragic marriage of a quintessential English gentleman to a dark beauty from the Empire's dominions. The American Civil War and its aftermath led to Trollope's insistence that English identity include the history of English complicity in the black Atlantic slave trade and American slavery, a history Trollope encodes in the creole discourses of the late novel Dr. Wortle's School. Reforming Trollope is a transformative examination of an author too long identified as the epitome of the complacent English gentleman.




Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction


Book Description

Jill Matus explores shock in Victorian fiction and psychology with startling results that reconfigure the history of trauma theory. Central to Victorian thinking about consciousness and emotion, shock is a concept that challenged earlier ideas about the relationship between mind and body. Although the new materialist psychology of the mid-nineteenth century made possible the very concept of a wound to the psyche - the recognition, for example, that those who escaped physically unscathed from train crashes or other overwhelming experiences might still have been injured in some significant way - it was Victorian fiction, with its complex explorations of the inner life of the individual and accounts of upheavals in personal identity, that most fully articulated the idea of the haunted, possessed and traumatized subject. This wide-ranging book reshapes our understanding of Victorian theories of mind and memory and reveals the relevance of nineteenth-century culture to contemporary theories of trauma.