This book is a comprehensive review of the political career of Benjamin Disraeli, providing a thorough critical analysis of one of the most ambitious and controversial leaders in British history. 'Disraeli and the Art of Victorian Politics' explores the political journey of a man propelled by a tremendous self-belief and capacity for self-invention through the complex world of Victorian political life. Disraeli retains a powerful presence in contemporary political discourse; whether in terms of current debates concerning the direction and leadership within the Conservative party or in more...

This book is a comprehensive review of the political career of Benjamin Disraeli, providing a thorough critical analysis of one of the most ambitious and controversial leaders in British history. 'Disraeli and the Art of Victorian Politics' explores the political journey of a man propelled by a tremendous self-belief and capacity for self-invention through the complex world of Victorian political life. Disraeli retains a powerful presence in contemporary political discourse; whether in terms of current debates concerning the direction and leadership within the Conservative party or in more...

'Sciences' were named and formed with great speed in the nineteenth century. Yet what constitutes a 'true' science? The Victorian era facilitated the rise of practices such as phrenology and physiognomy, so-called sciences that lost their status and fell out of use rather swiftly. This collection of essays seeks to examine the marginalised sciences of the nineteenth century in an attempt to define the shifting centres of scientific thinking, specifically asking: how do some sciences emerge to occupy central ground and how do others become consigned to the margins? The essays in this...

'Lesser Breeds' focuses on racism as manifested in the popular culture of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, exemplified by attitudes to the Chinese, Arabs, Blacks and Jews. This compelling book investigates the manifold expressions of prejudice in the popular arts of the period. Like Diamond's successful 'Victorian Sensation', this is a comparative exploration of how popular racism was naturalised, what issues it raised and fed off, and what this said about British people at the time. One of the author's key concerns is the way in which the popular media feeds on...

Long popular with a general readership, travel writing has, in the past three decades or so, become firmly established as an object of serious and multi-disciplinary academic inquiry. Few of the scholarly and popular publications that have focused on the nineteenth century have regarded the century as a whole. This broad volume examines the cultural and social aspects of travel writing on Africa, Asia, America, the Balkans and Australasia. An additional key feature of the volume will be its inclusion of different types of traveller. Several types of travellers and travel texts are...

This book explores the importance of sympathy as a central idea behind Victorian fiction, and an animating principle of novel reading generally. Sympathy, Brigid Lowe argues, deserves a much more important role as both a subject and a guiding principle for literary criticism.

Over the past thirty years, much literary theory has approached literature in general, and Victorian fiction in particular, in a spirit of suspicion. It has tried to purge criticism of the human subject, and of that distinctively human faculty, sympathy. Reading in a contrary, sympathetic mode, Lowe turns the...