Victorian culture is famous for its idealization of mothers and families, yet the popular novels of this period frequently feature mothers who are dead or otherwise absent. Through an analysis of the work of Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Darwin and Woolf, Carolyn Dever discusses this apparent paradox. She shows how the idealized dead mother is fundamental to the Victorians' idea of origins, and later becomes the central figure of Freudian psychoanalysis. Dever demonstrates that Victorian literature and psychoanalysis have much to teach us about each other.

This innovative collection of essays addresses important issues in the history of the book. The multidisciplinary essays consider different aspects of the production, circulation, and consumption of printed texts, analyzing such topics as market trends, modes of publication, and the use of pseudonyms by women writers. Contributors draw on speech act, reader response and gender theory in addition to historical, narratological, materialist, and bibliographical perspectives to study authors such as Dickens, the Brontes and George Eliot.

This book is the first full-length study of Byron's influence on Victorian writers, concentrating on Carlyle, Emily Bronte, Tennyson, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli and Wilde. It has two emphases--to demonstrate the ways that institutions of cultural production mediate the access that later writers have to earlier ones, and to suggest the many different responses that Victorian writers had to Byron and to his celebrity in British culture. It argues that defining oneself against Byron became a ritual of the Victorian authorial career. Victorian writers did not reject Byron outright: instead, they...

This is the first book about the relationship between the development of forensic science in the nineteenth century and the new literary genre of detective fiction in Britain and America--from Poe, Dickens and Hawthorne through Twain and Conan Doyle to Hammett, Chandler and Christie. Ronald R. Thomas is especially concerned with the authority the literary detective manages to secure through the "devices"--fingerprinting, photography, lie detectors--and the way in which those devices relate to broader questions of cultural authority at decisive moments in the history of the genre.

This book accounts for the resurgence of Gothic, and its immense popularity, during the British fin de siecle. In particular, Kelly Hurley explores a key scenario that haunts the genre: the loss of a unified and stable human identity, and the emergence of a chaotic and transformative "abhuman" identity in its place. Gothic is revealed as a highly productive and speculative genre, strongly indebted to nineteenth-century scientific, medical and social theories, including evolutionism, criminal anthropology and degeneration theory.

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.

Questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade. Cohen traces ways in which domestic work, often perceived as the most feminine of all activities, gained social credibility through being described in the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism. She shows how women sought identity and privilege within Victorian culture, and revises our understanding of nineteenth-century domestic ideology.

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.

Literary-historical account of Byron's influence on Victorian writers, concentrating on class and sexuality.

This book accounts for the resurgence of Gothic, and its immense popularity, during the British fin de siecle. In particular, Kelly Hurley explores a key scenario that haunts the genre: the loss of a unified and stable human identity, and the emergence of a chaotic and transformative "abhuman" identity in its place. Gothic is revealed as a highly productive and speculative genre, strongly indebted to nineteenth-century scientific, medical and social theories, including evolutionism, criminal anthropology and degeneration theory.