Victorian domestic novels routinely detect a savage otherness lurking within the English state and subject. Outlandish English Subjects in the Victorian Domestic Novel charts the development of this irony within evangelical and anthropological discourses and studies its emergence in the major works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, and George Meredith. Each of these writers disrupts the certitudes of imperial ideology by appropriating the language of ethnography and using it to describe the social domestic field. Providing fresh readings of both canonical and neglected...

Anxiety about adoring humans more than God frequently overshadows and sometimes derails the progress of romance in Victorian novels. By probing this anxiety and its narrative effects, Strange Gods uncovers how a central Protestant belief exerts its influence over stories about love and marriage.