Aestheticism and Sexual Parody adds a new and important dimension to the concept of parody as a combative strategy by which sexually marginalized groups undermine the status quo. From W. S. Gilbert's drama, and Vernon Lee and Christopher Isherwood's prose to George Du Maurier's cartoons and Max Beerbohm's caricatures, Dennis Denisoff explores the interactions of late nineteenth and twentieth century parody and aestheticism with the texts of canonical authors such as Alfred Tennyson, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde.

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.

This study of the Victorian fascination with fairies reveals their significance in Victorian art and literature. Nicola Bown explores what the fairy meant to the Victorians, and why they were so captivated by a figure which nowadays seems trivial and childish. She argues that fairies were a fantasy that allowed the Victorians to escape from their worries about science, technology and the effects of progress. The fairyland they dreamed about was a reconfiguration of their own world, and the fairies who inhabited it were like themselves.

Anna Silver examines the ways nineteenth-century British writers used physical states of the female body--hunger, appetite, fat and slenderness--in the creation of female characters. She argues that anorexia nervosa, first diagnosed in 1873, serves as a paradigm for the cultural ideal of middle-class womanhood in Victorian Britain. Silver uses the works of a wide range of writers (including Charlotte Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll) to demonstrate that mainstream models of middle-class Victorian womanhood share important qualities with the beliefs or...

This original and wide-ranging study shows how changing attitudes to evidence, trial and revelation in law and theology had a profound impact on literary narrative in the nineteenth century. Jan-Melissa Schramm, who is both a lawyer and a literary critic, argues that authors of fiction created a style of literary advocacy that both imitated, and reacted against, the example of their story-telling counterparts of the criminal Bar, and traces the ongoing debate over rules of evidence, eye-witness testimony and codes of ethical conduct that helped shape Victorian realism as a narrative form.

Ruskin's God is the first full-length study of the impact that John Ruskin's religion had on his many and varied writings. Part I, "The Author of Modern Painters," covers the first half of his career, when he was an Evangelical Christian and aimed to teach people how to see paintings, buildings and landscapes. In Part II, "Victorian Solomon," Michael Wheeler shows how in his later writings Ruskin, drawing on ancient wisdom, aimed to teach people how to live.

In this study Deborah Vlock shows that characters, dialogue, and plots from many of Charles Dickens' novels can be traced to the Victorian stage, and that contemporary readers and writers of fiction were strongly influenced by what they saw at the theater. Through an examination of theatrical and popular-cultural sources--including accounts of noted actors and actresses, and of popular theatrical characters of the time--Vlock uncovers unexpected precursors for some popular Dickensian characters, and throws new light on the conditions in which Dickens' novels were initially received.

Muscular Christianity was an important religious, literary, and social movement of the mid-nineteenth century. This volume draws on recent developments in cultural and gender theory to reveal close links between the ideology of the movement and the work of novelists and essayists, including Kingsley, Emerson, Dickens and Pater. Throughout this book, which also contributes to the critical debate on the body as a site for socio-political conflict, Muscular Christianity is shown to be at the heart of issues of gender, class, and national identity in the Victorian age.

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.

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.