Explores Thomas Hardy's engagement with Victorian legal debates in his prose fiction. Thomas Hardy's fiction is examined in this book in the context of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century as well as legal discourse in the literature of the era. The book examines the ways in which Hardy's role as a magistrate and his interest in the law impacted fundamentally on his prose fiction. It demonstrates that throughout his prose fiction Hardy engages with contentious legal issues that were debated by legal professionals and literary figures of his day, and argues that Hardy used...

Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes is a collection of essays that reflect on how the literature of the Victorian era engaged with new ways of thinking about time. These essays examine how Victorian fiction registers the psychological adjustment involved in keeping pace with industrial time as time-saving technologies aimed at making economic life more efficient, signalling the dawn of a new age of accelerated time. Examining canonical realist novels, popular literature and science fiction, these essays reveal an often ambivalent and complex response to the onset of...

This book is about selected Victorian texts and authors that in many cases have never before been subject to sustained scholarly attention. Taking inspiration from the pioneeringly capacious approach to the hidden hinterland of Victorian fiction adopted by scholars like John Sutherland and Franco Moretti, this energetically revisionist volume takes advantage of recent large-scale digitisation projects that allow unprecedented access to hitherto neglected literary texts and archives. Blending lively critical engagement with individual texts and close attention to often surprising trends in the...