An original and energetic examination of the relationship between theology, faith, religious history and national politics in the works of Oscar Wilde, which focuses in particular on his life-long attraction to Catholicism. Wilde's Protestant heritage is also scrutinised, and its continued influence on him, as well as his antagonism towards it, is related to the narrative modes he chose and the philosophical positions he adopted.

This, the first collection of essays on the aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee, offers a wide range of critical writings by scholars. Key works are examined including Euphorion, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories and Music and Its Lovers . New light is shed on Lee's relationships with contemporaries such as Lee-Hamilton, Pater and Wilde.

This study explores how poets who espoused republican political ideals sought to embody and advance those principles in their verse. By examining a range of canonical and non-canonical authors-including Blake, Shelley, Cooper, Linton, Landor, Meredith, Thomson and Swinburne, Kuduk Weiner connects the formal strategies of republican poems to the political theory and expressive cultures of republican radicalism. Her new study traces a strain of powerful, complex political poetry that casts new light on the political and literary history of nineteenth-century England.

Fictions of British Decadence is a fresh account of the emergence, development, and legacy of fiction written in the era of Oscar Wilde. It examines a broad range of texts by a diverse array of Decadent writers, from familiar figures such as Ernest Dowson and John Davidson to lesser-known innovators such as Arthur Machen and M.P. Shiel. MacLeod fills a large gap in understanding the movement that helped negotiate transition from the Victorian triple-decker to experimental Modernist fiction.

Examining innovations in audience behaviour, musical ensembles and mass-music movements, this book provides insight into how musical performances contributed to emerging ideas about class and national identity. Offering a fresh reading of bestselling fictional works of the day, Weliver draws upon crowd theory, climate theory, ethnology, science, music reviews and books by professional musicians to demonstrate how these discourses were mutually constitutive. This interdisciplinary undertaking will interest those working in the fields of English literature, musicology, social history and...

Why were so many late-nineteenth-century homosexuals passionate about the Italian Renaissance? This book answers that question by showing how the Victorian coupling of criminality with self-fashioning under the sign of the Renaissance provided queer intellectuals with an enduring model of ruthlessly permissive individualism.

This book examines the Great Exhibition as a decisive moment in the formation of a capitalist world picture. In so doing it foregrounds a vision of peace and progress which took hold of British society, within the Crystal Palace and beyond. It emphasizes too that this Victorian understanding of global order legitimized imperial ambition.

A Tale of Two Cities has always been one of Dickens's most popular texts. Using a variety of disciplinary approaches, this new collection of essays examines the origins of Dickens vision of the French Revolution, the literary power of the text itself, and its enduring place in British culture through stage and screen adaptations.

It is well known that much of our modern vocabulary of sex emerged within nineteenth-century German sexology. But how were the 'German ideas' translated and transmitted into English culture? This study provides an examination of the formation of sexual theory between the 1860s and 1930s and its migration across national and disciplinary boundaries.

Frank investigates an intertextual exchange between nineteenth-century historical disciplines (philology, cosmology, geology archaeology and evolutionary biology) and the detective fictions of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle. In responding to the writings of figures like Lyell, Darwin and E.B. Taylor, detective fiction initiated a transition from scriptural literalism and a prevailing Natural Theology to a naturalistic, secular worldview. In the process, detective fiction sceptically examined both the evidence such disciplines used and their narrative rendering of the world.