Though Friedrich Schiller enjoyed prominent literary standing and great popularity in nineteenth century literary England, his influence has been largely neglected in recent scholarship on the period.

First published in 2003, this book explores the substantial evidence of the importance of the playwright and philosopher’s thought to George Eliot’s novelistic art. It demonstrates the relationship between Schiller’s work and Eliot’s plotting of moral vision, the tensions in her work between realism and idealism, and her aesthetics. It also contends that the immense continental...

First published in 1990. Balzac, Zola and Faulkner all drew upon the principles of evolutionary theory to represent man’s place in nature and his struggle for survival in their major series La Comèdie humaine, Rougon-Macquart and the Yoknapatawpha fiction. This book focuses on the ‘first’ novels in each author’s series (La Père Goriot, La Fortune des Rougon and Flags in the Dust) and considers how each novel relates to its series and derives a definition of the naturalistic roman-fleuve. To describe this development, the issues of how a scientific idea...

First published in 1981, this book attempts to approach a better understanding of Disraeli the man through his life as a novelist. It is not a series of literary criticisms, rather an attempt to see how ‘fiction’ and the act of ‘fictionalising’ played an important part in Disraeli’s life. The author discusses how Disraeli’s novels in terms of how they reflected various stages of his life and development while assuming no knowledge of the, now mostly out-of-print, books on the part of the reader. This book fills the gap between the standard and comprehensive political...

First published in 2005, this book argues that, due to political and ideological shifts in the last decades of the nineteenth century a new depiction of social class was possible in the English novel. Late-century writers such as Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells question the middle-class Victorian views of class that had dominated the novel for decades through the disruption of traditional novelistic conventions. With reference to relevant maps, journalism, artwork, photography and specific historical events, this book contextualizes novels by these writers within their historical moment....

First published in 1979, this book looks at every aspect of the life and work of Elizabeth Gaskell, including her lesser known novels and writings — especially those concerning life in the industrial north of Victorian England. It shows how her work springs from a culture and society which pervades all she thought and wrote. An opening chapter explores her religion, culture, friendships and family. The major works are considered in turn and background material relevant to the novels’ industrial scenes is presented. The process of literary creation is charted in material drawn from...

First published in 1940 and revised in 1965, this work by the distinguished Hardy Scholar, Carl J. Weber, traces Hardy’s literary career from High Brockhampton to the grave in Poet’s corner, Westminster Abbey. Using a multitude of letters, it explains why Thomas Hardy wrote, and how his books grew from ideas, emotions and experiences to the printed volumes that have delighted the world.

This book will be of interest to those studying the works of Thomas Hardy and 19^th century literature.

First published in 1988, this book looks at the enormous impact Dickens’ writings had on American novelists in the second half of the nineteenth century. Dickens dominated not only popular taste but the American novel for sixty years and the author argues that even the most original writers showed themselves again and again to be in ‘conscious sympathy’ with Dickens. Along with Dickens, this book examines four radically different American writers — Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Henry James and Frank Norris — whose debt to Dickens, the author asserts, is nevertheless clearly...

First published in 2009, this book investigates the cultural significance of nineteenth-century women’s writing and reading practices. Beginning with an examination of non-fictional diaries and the practice of diary writing, it assesses the interaction between the fictional diary and other forms of literary production such as epistolary narrative, the periodical, the factual document and sensation fiction. The discrepancies between the private diary and its use as a narrative device are explored through the writings of Frances Burney, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Brontë, Dinah Craik, Wilkie...

A sympathetic view of the fallen women in Victorian England begins in the novel. First published in 1984, this book shows that the fallen woman in the nineteenth-century novel is, amongst other things, a direct response to the new society. Through the examination of Dickens, Gaskell, Collins, Moore, Trollope, Gissing and Hardy, it demonstrates that the fallen woman is the first in a long line of sympathetic creations which clash with many prevailing social attitudes, and especially with the supposedly accepted dichotomy of the ‘two women’.

This book will be of interest to...

Anthony Trollope is perhaps best known for the group of Barsetshire novels, a rich and enduring picture of society in a small cathedral town. He also wrote a number of Irish novels and a series about political society known as the ‘Palliser novels’.

First published in 1978, this introduction to Trollope’s life and work surveys all of his forty-seven novels, as well as his various miscellaneous works, and calls for a reassessment of his impressive achievement.

This book will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature.