The essays in this collection demonstrate how late-Victorian and Edwardian neurology and fiction shared common philosophical concerns and rhetorical strategies. Between 1860 and 1920, neurologists like Silas Weir Mitchell and Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote moving literature, while novelists like H.G. Wells and Wilkie Collins used fiction to dramatize neurological discoveries and their consequences. These six decades witnessed unprecedented interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and artists, who found common ground in their shared ambivalence towards the prevailing intellectual...

As the nineteenth-century drew to a close, women became more numerous and prominent in British journalism. This book offers a fascinating introduction to the work lives of twelve such journalists, and each essay examines the career, writing and strategic choices of women battling against the odds to secure recognition in a male-dominated society.

How are objects central to the formation of individuals, their communities, and their liberties? What role do objects play as they move between societies and their different systems of value as commodities, as charms, as gifts, as trophies, or as curses? Nineteenth-century British authors attempting to transport narrative realism to the colonies confronted such questions directly and indirectly as they struggled to represent competing forms of material investment that characterized colonial and postcolonial life in Africa. Reading works by authors from Joseph Conrad and Mary Kingsley to Anna...

Literature, Journalism and Liberal Culture, 1886-1916 explores the ways in which the vocabularies of advanced or 'new' liberalism permeated English literary cultural discourse from the late 1880s to World War One. Drawing on a wide range of autobiographical and biographical material, this book reconstructs an extensive network of advanced liberal journalists, men of letters, and political theorists associated with key organs of the daily and weekly press, and demonstrates for the first time the network's importance in the literary cultural world at the turn of the century. Until now,...

Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950 explores a range of real and fictional colonial girlhood experiences from Jamaica, Mauritius, South Africa, India, New Zealand, Australia, England, Ireland, and Canada to reflect on the transitional state of girlhood between childhood and adulthood.

This book explores the aesthetic practices used by Dickens to make the space which we have come to know as the Dickensian City. The city is shown to be an imagined or virtual world but with a serious aim for a serious game: Dickens sets up a workshop for the simulation of real societies and cities.

Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture examines how literary fairy tales were informed by natural historical knowledge in the Victorian period, as well as how popular science books used fairies to explain natural history at a time when 'nature' became a much debated word.

William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England offers a thorough re-appraisal of William Cobbett (1763-1835), situating his journalism and rural radicalism in relation to contemporary political debates.

This exciting new study looks at degeneration and deviance in nineteenth-century science and late-Victorian Gothic fiction. The questions it raises are as relevant today as they were at the nineteenth century's fin de siecle: What constitutes the norm from which a deviation has occurred? What exactly does it mean to be 'normal' or 'abnormal'?

Transport in British Fiction is the first essay collection devoted to transport and its various types-horse, train, tram, cab, omnibus, bicycle, ship, car, air and space-as represented in British fiction across a century of unprecedented technological change that was as destabilizing as it was progressive.