John Glavin offers both a performative reading of Dickens the novelist and an exploration of the potential for adaptive performance of the novels themselves. Through close study of text and context Glavin uncovers a richly ambivalent, often unexpectedly hostile, relationship between Dickens and the theater and theatricality of his own time, and shows how Dickens' novels can be seen as a form of counter performance. Yet Glavin also explores the performative potential in Dickens' fiction, and describes new ways to stage that fiction in emotionally powerful, critically acute adaptations.

In Victorian Writing about Risk, Elaine Freedgood explores a wide spectrum of once-popular literature, including works on political economy, sanitary reform, balloon flight, and African exploration. The consolations offered by this geography of risk are precariously predicated on the stability of dominant Victorian definitions of people and places. Women, men, the laboring and middle classes, Africa and Africans: all have assigned identities that allow risk to be located and contained. When identities shift and boundaries fail, danger and safety begin to appear in all the wrong places.

Matthew Campbell explores the work of four Victorian poets--Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Hardy--in the context of their concern with questions of human agency and will. Through close study of meter, rhyme and rhythm, Campbell reveals how closely, for these poets, questions of poetics are related to issues of psychology, ethics and social change. He goes on to discuss more general questions of poetics, from Milton through Romanticism and into contemporary critical debate, making a major contribution to the current renewal of interest in formalist readings of poetry.

Gail Marshall looks at actresses on the English stage of the later nineteenth century, and argues that much of their work was determined by the popularity at the time of images of Classical sculpture. They were often encouraged to look as much as possible like statues, and thus to appear to their audiences as sexually desirable objects rather than creative artists. The book draws for its evidence on theatrical fictions, visual representations, and popular culture's assimilation of the sculptural image, as well as on theatrical productions.

This study investigates human curiosity and its depiction in eavesdropping scenes in nineteenth-century English and French novels. Ann Gaylin sheds light on the social and psychological effects of the nineteenth-century rise of information technology and accelerated flow of information, as manifested in the anxieties about (and delight in) displays of private life and its secrets. She analyzes eavesdropping in Austen, Balzac, Collins, and Proust. This innovative study is of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century English and European literature.

This study of narrative technique in Victorian novels introduces the concept of "narrative annexes" whereby unexpected characters, impermissible subjects and plot-changing events enter fictional worlds that otherwise exclude them, challenging Victorian cultural and literary norms. Original readings of novels by Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Disraeli, Hardy, Kingsley, Trollope and Wells show these writers negotiating the boundaries of representation to reveal subjects (notably sexuality and social class) that contemporary critics sought to exclude from the realm of the novel.

Walter Pater is increasingly gaining recognition as a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century culture. William F. Shuter shows that Pater authorized rereadings of his work in an effort to rewrite his own literary and cultural past. Drawing on unpublished manuscript material, Shuter shows how Pater's later work can serve, paradoxically, as an introduction to the earlier. Such a rereading of Pater's work uncovers patterns of continuity and anticipation that decisively alter our understanding of Pater and his writings.

This study addresses the question of why ideas of ancestry and kinship were so important in nineteenth-century society, and particularly in the Victorian novel. Sophie Gilmartin discusses what makes people believe that they are part of a certain region, race or nation, and what part is played by superstitious belief, invented traditions and fictions. Gilmartin's study shows that ideas of ancestry and kinship, and the narratives inspired by or invented around them, were of profound significance in the construction of Victorian identity.

A fascinating study of the intellectual links between evolutionary science and literature.

Between 1838 and 1852, the leading Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star, published over 1000 poems written by more than 350 poets - as the readership of the Northern Star numbered hundreds of thousands, these poems were amongst the most widely read of the Victorian era. This book offers a complete record of all the poems published. It asks a simple question: why did the writing and reading of poetry play such an important role in Chartism's struggle to secure fundamental democratic rights? It answers this question by analysing the interplay between politics, aesthetics and history in the...