Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century

This book studies the science and sexuality of legs during the Victorian period.

This book focuses on alternative forms of knowledge production and speculation in nineteenth century US-American society, and highlights the strategies that minoritarian subjects developed to understand and navigate these complex cultures of knowledge and capital.

This book explores how Canadians and Canadian readers have fashioned their self-image as an antislavery haven, showing a more complicated picture of Canada as a slaveholding, exploitative and racist place.

The first book-length, historical study of invasion-scare and future-war fiction in Britain before and during the First World War in half a century, and the definitive cultural and political history of the genre.

Part recovery and part new reading method, this work locates the few kept mistresses in Victorian literature, while offering a queer way to read for their existences when less legible. This book offers a way to read old material with new eyes and a social justice ethic.

Reveals how British writers and artists engaged with archaeological discourse as a crucial mode of conceptualising modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. Examining multiple literary genres and visual media from 1880-1930, the book traces archaeological discourse in discussions about sexuality, aesthetics, authenticity, and historiography.

Unearthing previously unseen manuscript and print evidence, the book redefines the notion of Dante’s reception by conducting the first material and book-historical inquiry into the formation and popularisation of the the critical and scholarly discourse on Dante in Victorian culture.

Prioritising south-south networks and relations, this collection brings together for the first time literary studies of British colonies in nineteenth-century Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific Islands. It argues for the importance of a new literary history of the southern colonies that accounts for Indigenous, diasporic, and southern perspectives.

Penny politics explores how and why Victorian popular literature from the 1830s and 1840s appealed to politicised, intermittently radicalised working-class audiences by supplementing its violent, counter-cultural entertainments with openly political content.

Through the analysis of a wide range of sources, which include aquarium manuals, articles and fictional works, The Victorian aquarium investigates the nineteenth-century vogue for home tanks; the book retraces the development and decline of the ‘aquarium mania’, exploring both its historical specificity and its far-ranging cultural resonance.

Every Siddal poem is close read alongside works by Rossetti, Swinburne, Ruskin, Tennyson and Keats and with reference to prevailing cultural, political and religious contexts to give the most comprehensive analysis yet of this enigmatic, previously undervalued poetic voice.

Spectral Dickens posits a spectral dimension of literary character. By analyzing Dickens’ illustrated novels through a frame of ontologically-haunted concepts like the Freudian uncanny, Derridean spectrality, and the Lacanian Real, Bove’s work haunts the opposition between fictional character and real person with the uncanniness of literary forms.

Madrid on the move offers an account of illustrated print culture and the urban experience in nineteenth-century Spain. It provides a fresh account of modernity from a transnational perspective. Drawing on different kinds of printed images and texts, the book explores what being modern meant to people in their daily lives.

Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist offers the first critical appraisal of the work of Marie Duval 1847–1890), one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth century, focusing on new types of cultural work by women and establishing Duval as a unique but exemplary figure in a transformational period of the nineteenth century.

At the heart of the book is a departure from the obsession with “modernity” that has been so prominent in nineteenth-century cultural studies.

Tracing the dual alphabet from its intervention by Carolingian scribes to its rejection by modernist poets and the Bauhaus printers, Edwards shows how Charles Dickens and other nineteenth century writers used the distinction between upper and lower case letters in unconventional ways and in the interests of a wider radicalism.

Engine of modernity examines the connection between public transportation and popular culture in nineteenth-century Paris through a focus on the omnibus - a horse-drawn urban conveyance. The book introduces the omnibus as a key vector for understanding the intersection of urban and literary modernity in France.

Pasts at play showcases a range of approaches to children's literature and culture, from disciplines including Classics, English Literature, and History. The ten essays integrate visual and material culture into historical practice to analyse how nineteenth-century children interacted playfully with the past to generate moral lessons.

Extends counterfactual thought experiments from history and the social sciences to literary historiography, criticism and theory

This collection places the life and work of Margaret Harkness at the heart of a broader consideration of the socially turbulent decades around the turn of the twentieth century in order to illuminate historical forms of women’s political activism.

Confronted by a complex new society, nineteenth-century Spaniards wrestled with how to envisage their lives. From trying to be universal through to acting as a cultural entrepreneur, this volume explores the possibilities and uncertainties that unfolded in their reconfigured world

This volume explores the novels and short stories of the popular author Richard Marsh through a range of critical lenses. An exemplary figure of the New Grub Street, Marsh was an important presence within fin-de-siècle literary culture, whose middlebrow genre fiction simultaneously reinforces and challenges the dominant discourses of the period.

Through innovative readings of seven novels, Creating character demonstrates how the Victorian sensation authors Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins employed, challenged and explored diverse, and sometimes contradictory, theories of character formation in their fiction

This book aims to intervene in current critical contexts for the study of nineteenth-century literature within the academy and beyond. Topics discussed include science and technology, poetry and philosophy, the Gothic, anatomical exhibitions, Punjabi popular culture and the neo-Victorian in literature, film and performance.

Charlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives is a timely reflection on the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s life and work. The new essays in this volume, which cover the period from Brontë’s first publication to the twenty-first century, explain why her work has endured in so many different forms and contexts.