The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel

by Edited by Deirdre David

• ISBN13: 9780521646192
• ISBN10: 0521646197
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-01-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, a series of specially-commissioned essays examine the work of Charles Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot and other canonical writers, as well as that of such writers as Olive Schreiner, Wilkie Collins and H. Rider Haggard, whose work has recently attracted new attention from scholars and students. The collection combines the literary study of the novel as a form with analysis of the material aspects of its readership and production, and a series of thematic and contextual perspectives that examine Victorian fiction in the light of social and cultural concerns relevant both to the period itself and to the direction of current literary and cultural studies. Contributors engage with topics such as industrial culture, religion and science and the broader issues of the politics of gender, sexuality and race. The Companion includes a chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	xi
Chronology	xiii
Introduction	1	(16)
Deirdre David
The Victorian novel and its readers	17	(20)
Kate Flint
The business of Victorian publishing	37	(24)
Simon Eliot
The aesthetics of the Victorian novel: form, subjectivity, ideology	61	(16)
Linda M. Shires
Industrial culture and the Victorian novel	77	(20)
Joseph W. Childers
Gender and the Victorian novel	97	(28)
Nancy Armstrong
Sexuality in the Victorian novel	125	(24)
Jeff Nunokawa
Race and the Victorian novel	149	(20)
Patrick Brantlinger
Detection in the Victorian novel	169	(23)
Ronald R. Thomas
Sensation and the fantastic in the Victorian novel	192	(20)
Lyn Pykett
Intellectual debate in the Victorian novel: religion, science, and the professional	212	(22)
John Kucich
Dickens, Melville, and a tale of two countries	234	(21)
Robert Weisbuch
Guide to further reading	255	(7)
Index	262