Description
Book Synopsis The Victorian Era saw a revolution in communication technology. Millions of texts emerged from a complex network of writers, editors, publishers and reviewers, to shape and be shaped by the dynamics of a rapidly industrializing society. Many of these works offer fundamental, often surprising insights into Victorian society. Why, for example, did the innocuously titled Essays and Reviews (1860) trigger public outrage? How did Eliza Lynn Linton become the first salaried woman journalist in England? What is table-talk?
Critical approaches to Victorian prose have long focused on a few canonical writers. Recent scholarship has recognized a wide diversity of practitioners, forms and modes of dissemination. Presented in accessible A-Z format, this literary companion reinstates nonfiction as a principal vehicle of knowledge and debate in Victorian Britain.
Trade Review“A brilliant companion, not only to Victorian non-fiction prose, but to the Victorian Age itself. Rees combines scholarly erudition with vivid life-drawing, so that each subject seems to leap off the page to escort the reader into their particular region of Victorian life. Although it is designed as a work of reference, to be ‘dipped into’, I found it almost impossible to put down. The entry on Charles Spurgeon (‘the most published English-speaking Christian of all time’) led me to W.T. Stead then to Robert Louis Stevenson and on to John Addington Symonds and I emerged with a much richer sense of the texture of life of a period I thought I already knew well. This is a tour de force of scholarship which should become indispensable, not only to the 19C scholar, but to anyone needing a deeper understanding of the Victorian Age.” —Valerie Purton, emeritus professor of Victorian literature, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
Table of Contents
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments delete
- Preface delete
- Textual Notes delete
- Abbreviations delete
- Introduction delete
- Alphabetical List of Works Discussed delete
- Victorian Nonfiction Prose: A Companion delete
- Appendix A: Timeline of Prose Texts
- and Historical Events delete
- Appendix B: Glossary delete
- Works Cited delete
- Index
