Description
Book SynopsisCaptures the extraordinary variety of literary output produced during the Victorian era Analyzes the development of major literary forms in conjunction with developments in social and intellectual history Addresses the ways in which writers engaged with the variety of new forms of social engagement in literature during the Victorian era.
Trade Review"This is a beautifully written, truly intelligent book that understands the Victorians. Reading this volume was a pleasure that brought home rather forcefully the relatively functional nature of so much professional academic prose." (
Victorian Studies, Spring 2010)
"This elegant and far-reaching book offers a surprising source of optimism to those working in the humanities in Higher Education." (Dickens Quarterly, 2010)
"Throughout his prose is clear and unpretentious--in short, entirely appropriate for his intended audience. Though specialists may quibble over what Adams chooses to omit from this concise account, this book is a remarkable achievement." (CHOICE, October 2009)
"...its breadth of coverage is staggering. It includes all the major figures and genres of the age, hosts of relatively minor authors and works, and all the important subgenres. Also, by placing the individual works in their ever-shifting literary and cultural milieus, it provides a depth of insight lacking in more narrowly conceived studies.... Also, it may well stimulate an exploration of the work of such important but neglected authors as Ainsworth, Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton, not to mention such utterly forgotten authors as Catherine Gore. Adams, in fact, seems to have read so much of the relatively minor and currently neglected literature of the entire period, and writes about it with such gusto and infectious enthusiasm that he extends the breadth and depth of the entire field of Victorian studies and will doubtless inspire specialists as well as less advanced students of the period to read works they might otherwise have viewed as expendable. The book is indeed so replete with valuable insights into so many works and authors that the reader who has taken in its chronological sweep by reading from the introduction through the epilogue will undoubtedly return over and over again via the index to review the readings of particular works" (New Books Online, September 2009)
Table of ContentsPreface ix
Note on Citations xiii
Introduction: Locating Victorian Literature 1
Byron is Dead 1
Cultural Contexts 2
The Literary Field 11
An Age of Prose 14
The Situation of Poetry 19
Victorian Theater 21
The Novel After Scott 22
1 "The Times are Unexampled": Literature in the Age of Machinery, 1830–1850 27
Constructing the Man of Letters 27
The Burdens of Poetry 33
Theater in the 1830s 48
Fiction in the Early 1830s 50
Dickens and the Forms of Fiction 55
Poetry after the Annuals 66
Literature of Travel 70
History and Heroism 73
Social Crisis and the Novel 81
The Domestic Ideal 84
From Silver-Fork to Farce 86
Poetry in the Early 1840s 89
The Literature of Labor 95
Medievalism 98
"The Two Nations" 101
"What's Money After All?" 111
Romance and Religion 116
The Novel of Development 123
Art, Politics, and Faith 127
In Memoriam 137
2 Crystal Palace and Bleak House: Expansion and Anomie, 1851–1873 143
The Novel and Society 145
Crimea and the Forms of Heroism 156
Empire 164
Spasmodics and Other Poets 168
The Power of Art 182
Realisms 187
Two Guineveres 194
Sensation 200
Dreams of Self-Fashioning 207
Narrating Nature: Darwin 215
Novels and their Audiences 218
Literature for Children 228
Poetry in the Early 1860s 232
Criticism and Belief 244
The Pleasures of the Difficult 250
The Hellenic Tradition 259
Domesticity, Politics, Empire, and the Novel 267
After Dickens 275
The Persistence of Epic 282
Poisonous Honey and Fleshly Poetry 286
3 The Rise of Mass Culture and the Specter of Decline, 1873–1901 293
Science, Materialism, and Value 296
Twilight of the Poetic Titans 305
The Decline of the Marriage Plot 314
The Aesthetic Movement 325
Aesthetic Poetry 329
Life-Writing 333
Morality and the Novel 342
Romance 351
Regionalism 356
The Arrival of Kipling 360
Fiction and the Forms of Belief 365
Sex, Science, and Danger 370
Fictions of the Artist 375
Decadence 377
Drama in the 1880s 381
The New Woman in Fiction 386
Decadent Form 394
The Poetry of London 400
Yeats 405
The Scandal of Wilde 408
Poetry After Wilde 411
Fictions of Decline 416
Conrad 423
Epilogue 429
Works Cited 435
Index 451
