Queen Victoria's central importance to the era defined by her reign is self-evident, and yet it has been surprisingly overlooked in the study of Victorian culture. This collection of essays by noted scholars in literature, cultural studies, art history, and women's studies goes beyond biography and official history to explore the diverse and sometimes conflicting meanings this complex and fascinating figure held for her subjects around the world and even for those outside her empire.

A collection of essays on the writings of Virginia Woolf, this study demonstrates how Woolf's conceptualizations of history and narrative are intimately bound up with her ways of thinking about women, writing and social and sexual relations. The author's approach has been to steer Woolf studies towards feminist historical concerns. This is demonstrated by precise, detailed configurations, setting Woolf texts alongside texts both contemporary and distant, scientific and literary, illuminating her writing in unexpected contexts.

Gillian Beer's classic Darwin's Plots, one of the most influential works of literary criticism and cultural history of the last quarter century, is here reissued in an updated edition to coincide with the anniversary of Darwin's birth and of the publication of The Origin of Species. Its focus on how writers, including George Eliot, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hardy, responded to Darwin's discoveries and to his innovations in scientific language continues to open up new approaches to Darwin's thought and to its effects in the culture of his contemporaries. This third edition includes an...

Gillian Beer's classic Darwin's Plots, one of the most influential works of literary criticism and cultural history of the last quarter century, is here reissued in an updated edition to coincide with the anniversary of Darwin's birth and of the publication of The Origin of Species. Its focus on how writers, including George Eliot, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hardy, responded to Darwin's discoveries and to his innovations in scientific language continues to open up new approaches to Darwin's thought and to its effects in the culture of his contemporaries. This third edition includes an...

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll created fantastic worlds that continue to delight and trouble readers of all ages today. Few consider, however, that Carroll conceived his Alice books during the 1860s, a moment of intense intellectual upheaval, as new scientific, linguistic, educational, and mathematical ideas flourished around him and far beyond. Alice in Space reveals the contexts within which the Alice books first lived, bringing back the zest to jokes lost over time and poignancy to hidden references.

Gillian Beer...

Alice in Space reveals the contexts within which the Alice books first lived, bringing back the zest to jokes lost over time and poignancy to hidden references.

This is an enlarged edition of Professor Beer's widely acclaimed volume on George Eliot which initially appeared in the `Key Women Writers' series issued by The Harvester Press.