The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel

by Rodensky, Lisa

• ISBN13: 9780199533145
• ISBN10: 0199533148
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-09-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Much has been written about the Victorian novel, and for good reason. The cultural power it exerted (and, to some extent, still exerts) is beyond question. The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to this thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics (the novel and science, the Victorian Bildungroman) as well as essays on topics often overlooked (the novel and classics, the novel and the OED, the novel, and allusion). Manifesting the increasing interdisciplinarity of Victorian studies, its essays situate the novel within a complex network of relations (among, for instance, readers, editors, reviewers, and the novelists themselves; or among different cultural pressures - the religious, the commercial, the legal). The handbook's essays also build on recent bibliographic work of remarkable scope and detail, responding to the growing attention to print culture. With a detailed introduction and 36 newly commissioned chapters by leading and emerging scholars -- beginning with Peter Garside's examination of the early nineteenth-century novel and ending with two essays proposing the 'last Victorian novel' -- the handbook attends to the major themes in Victorian scholarship while at the same time creating new possibilities for further research. Balancing breadth and depth, the clearly-written, nonjargon -laden essays provide readers with overviews as well as original scholarship, an approach which will serve advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars. As the Victorians get further away from us, our versions of their culture and its novel inevitably change; this Handbook offers fresh explorations of the novel that teach us about this genre, its culture, and, by extension, our own.

Author Biography

Lisa Rodensky is the Barbara Morris Caspersen Associate Professor in the Humanities (2011-14) at Wellesley College. She is the author of The Crime in Mind: Criminal Responsibility and the Victorian Novel (2003) and the editor of Decadent Poetry from Wilde to Naidu (2006). Her essays have appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture and Essays in Criticism. She is currently at work on an analysis of the critical vocabulary of the nineteenth-century novel review.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Lisa Rodensky
Beginnings.
The Early Nineteenth-Century English Novel, 1820-1836, Peter Garside
New Histories of English Literature and the Rise of the Novel, 1835-1859, William McKelvy
Genre, Criticism and the Early Victorian Novel, Rebecca Edwards Newman
Publishing, Reading, Reviewing, Quoting, Censoring.
Publishing the Victorian Novel, Rachel Sagner Buurma
The Victorian Novel and Its Readers, Debra Gettelman
The Victorian Novel and the Reviews, Solveig C. Robinson
The Victorian Novel and the OED, Lynda Mugglestone
The Novel and Censorship in Late-Victorian England, BarbaraLeckie
The Victorian Novel Elsewhere.
Victorian Novels in France, Marie-Francoise Cachin
Victorian Literature and Russian Culture: Translation, Reception, Influence, Affinity, Julie Buckler
The Victorian Novel and America, Amanda Claybaugh
Colonial India and Victorian Storytelling, Margery Sabin
Technologies: Communication, Travel, Visual
The Victorian Novel and Communication Networks, Richard Menke
Technologies of Travel and the Victorian Novel, Alison Byerly
Victorian Photography and the Novel, Jennifer Green-Lewis
The Middle.
Novels of the 1860s, Janice Carlisle
Commerce, Work, Professions.
Industrialism and the Victorian Novel, Evan Horwitz
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Money: Max Weber, Silas Marner, and the Victorian Novel, George Levine
The Novel and the Professions, Jennifer Ruth
Gentleman's Latin, Lady's Greek, Kenneth Haynes
The Novel and Other Disciplines.
The Victorian Novel and Science, Jonathan Smith
The Victorian Novel and Medicine, Meegan Kennedy
Naturalizing the Mind in the Victorian Novel: Consciousness in Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch and Thomas Hardy's Woodlanders Two Case Studies, Suzy Anger
The Victorian Novel and the Law, Jan-Melissa Schramm
The Novel and Religion: Catholicism and Victorian Women's Novels, Patrick R. O'Malley
The Victorian Novel and Horticulture, Lynn Voskuil
The Victorian Novel and Theater, Emily Allen
Poetry and Criticism.
Verse Versus the Novel, James Najarian
Poetic Allusion and the Novel, Philip Horne
The Novelist as Critic, Christopher Ricks
Distinguishing the Victorian Novel.
The Moral Scope of the English Bildungsroman, Julia Prewitt Brown
Three Matters of Style, Mark Lambert
Endings.
The Novel, its Critics, and the University: A New Beginning?, Anna Vaninskaya
The Victorian Novel and the New Woman, Talia Schaffer
The Last Victorian Novel
Slapstick Noir: The Secret Agent Works the Victorian Novel, Rosemarie Bodenheimer
The Quest of the Silver Fleece, by W. E. B. Du Bois, Daniel Hack