Description
Book SynopsisThe Companion to the Victorian Novel provides contextual and critical information about the entire range of British fiction published between 1837 and 1901. * Provides contextual and critical information about the entire range of British fiction published during the Victorian period.
Trade Review"These are wonderful essays [...] written by important scholars in the field. [...]Highly recommended."
Choice "another Blackwell reference work of prodigious proportions [...] by a galaxy of distinguished scholars [...] indispensable for any comprehensive reference library, destined indeed to be of permanent value and importance for many years to come." Reference Reviews
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments viii
The Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing
PART I Historical Contexts and Cultural Issues 9
1 The Publishing World 11
Kelly J. Mays
2 Education, Literacy, and the Victorian Reader 31
Jonathan Rose
3 Money, the Economy, and Social Class 48
Regenia Gagnier
4 Victorian Psychology 67
Athena Vrettos
5 Empire, Race, and the Victorian Novel 84
Deirdre David
6 The Victorian Novel and Religion 101
Hilary Fraser
7 Scientific Ascendancy 119
John Kucich
8 Technology and Information: Accelerating Developments 137
Christopher Keep
9 Laws, the Legal World, and Politics 155
John R. Reed
10 Gender Politics and Women’s Rights 172
Hilary M. Schor
11 The Other Arts: Victorian Visual Culture 189
Jeffrey Spear
12 Imagined Audiences: The Novelist and the Stage 207
Renata Kobetts Miller
PART II Forms of the Victorian Novel 225
13 Newgate Novel to Detective Fiction 227
F. S. Schwarzbach
14 The Historical Novel 244
John Bowen
15 The Sensation Novel 260
Winifred Hughes
16 The Bildungsroman 279
John R. Maynard
17 The Gothic Romance in the Victorian Period 302
Cannon Schmitt
18 The Provincial or Regional Novel 318
Ian Duncan
19 Industrial and “Condition of England” Novels 336
James Richard Simmons, Jr.
20 Children’s Fiction 353
Lewis C. Roberts
21 Victorian Science Fiction 370
Patrick Brantlinger
PART III Victorian and Modern Theories of the Novel and the Reception of Novels and Novelists Then and Now 385
22 The Receptions of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy 387
Elizabeth Langland
23 Victorian Theories of the Novel 406
Joseph W. Childers
24 Modern and Postmodern Theories of Prose Fiction 424
Audrey Jaffe
25 The Afterlife of the Victorian Novel: Novels about Novels 442
Anne Humpherys
26 The Victorian Novel in Film and on Television 458
Joss Marsh and Kamilla Elliott
Index 478
