This study challenges the traditional tendency to regard Charlotte Bronte as having existed in a historical vacuum, by setting her work firmly within the context of Victorian psychological debate. Based on considerable local research, using texts ranging from local newspaper copy to the medical tomes in the Reverend Patrick Bronte's library, the author explores the interpenetration of economic, social and psychological discourse in the early and mid 19th-century, and traces the ways in which Charlotte Bronte's texts operate in relation to this complex, often contradictory, discursive...

This book accounts for the resurgence of Gothic, and its immense popularity, during the British fin de siecle. In particular, Kelly Hurley explores a key scenario that haunts the genre: the loss of a unified and stable human identity, and the emergence of a chaotic and transformative "abhuman" identity in its place. Gothic is revealed as a highly productive and speculative genre, strongly indebted to nineteenth-century scientific, medical and social theories, including evolutionism, criminal anthropology and degeneration theory.

Queen Victoria's central importance to the era defined by her reign is self-evident, and yet it has been surprisingly overlooked in the study of Victorian culture. This collection of essays by noted scholars in literature, cultural studies, art history, and women's studies goes beyond biography and official history to explore the diverse and sometimes conflicting meanings this complex and fascinating figure held for her subjects around the world and even for those outside her empire.

This book examines the representation of a variety of arts--primarily painting, theater, and music--within the work of major nineteenth-century novelists. It charts a historical progression, from Romantic poetry, through mid-century Realism, to Aestheticism, showing how authors used references to other forms of art to illuminate their own aesthetic ideals. Examining the aesthetic theory and cultural practice of different arts, Alison Byerly demonstrates the importance of artistic representation to the development of Victorian Realism.

Questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade. Cohen traces ways in which domestic work, often perceived as the most feminine of all activities, gained social credibility through being described in the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism. She shows how women sought identity and privilege within Victorian culture, and revises our understanding of nineteenth-century domestic ideology.

Pamela Gilbert argues that popular fiction in mid-Victorian Britain was regarded as both feminine and diseased. She discusses work by three popular women novelists of the time: M. E. Braddon, Rhoda Broughton and "Ouida." Early and later novels of each writer are interpreted in the context of their reception, showing that attitudes toward fiction drew on Victorian beliefs about health, nationality, class and the body, beliefs that the fictions themselves both resisted and exploited.

Victorian culture is famous for its idealization of mothers and families, yet the popular novels of this period frequently feature mothers who are dead or otherwise absent. Through an analysis of the work of Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Darwin and Woolf, Carolyn Dever discusses this apparent paradox. She shows how the idealized dead mother is fundamental to the Victorians' idea of origins, and later becomes the central figure of Freudian psychoanalysis. Dever demonstrates that Victorian literature and psychoanalysis have much to teach us about each other.

In this innovative study Nancy Henry introduces new facts that place George Eliot's life and work within the contexts of mid-nineteenth-century British colonialism and imperialism. She examines Eliot's roles as an investor in colonial stocks, a parent to emigrant sons, and a reader of colonial literature. She highlights the importance of these contexts to our understanding of Eliot's fiction and her position within Victorian culture. The book also reexamines the assumptions of postcolonial criticism about Victorian fiction and its relation to empire.

During the Irish Famine of 1845-52, novels by Dickens and Gaskell, as well as a range of commentaries on the Irish disaster, argued for a new theory of individual expression in opposition to the systemized approach to economic life that political economy proposed. These romantic views of human subjectivity eventually provided the foundation for a new theory of capitalism based on the desires of the individual consumer.

Examining the important role played by the Victorian periodical in defining and refining gender roles during the second half of the nineteenth century, this study analyzes the periodical press in nineteenth-century culture. It considers issues of gender in the presses' development as a powerful political and social medium. The authors examine broad questions as they are explored in a range of periodicals, from literary and political reviews to comic magazines.