First published in 1969, this edition collection brings together a series of essays offering a re-evaluation of Victorian poetry in the light of early 20th Century criticism. The essays in this collection concentrate upon the poets whose reputations suffered from the great redirection of energy in English criticism initiated in this century by Eliot, Richards and Leavis. What theses poets wrote about, the values they expressed, the form of the poems, the language they used, all these were examined and found wanting in some radical way. One of the results of this criticism was the renewal of...

The first collection to make a comprehensive study of nineteenth-century women's poetry from late Romantic to late Victorian 'new woman' writers. Eighteen essays consider the gendered codes and genres developed by sophisticated poets. The feminine subject and marketing, a woman's tradition, lesbian desire, war, race, colonial experience, religion and science are themes of the collection, featuring, as well as the familiar Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, other poets such as 'L.E.L.', Felicia Hemans, Amy Levy and Augusta Webster.

Novel Politics aims to change the current consensus of thinking about the nineteenth-century novel. This assumes that the novel is structured by bourgeois ideology and morality, so that its default position is conservative and hegemonic. Such critique comes alike from Marxists, readers of nineteenth-century liberalism, and critics making claims for the working-class novel, and systematically under-reads democratic imaginations and social questioning in novels of the period. To undo such readings means evolving a new praxis of critical writing. Rather than addressing the explicitly political...