How were the genres of literature changed by new methods of serialization and publishing? How did a widespread culture of performance emerge in the period to shape as well as to be shaped by the novel and poetry? David Amigoni draws on the most recent critical approaches to the novel, Victorian melodrama and poetry to answer these and other questions. The work of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Carlyle and Mathew Arnold are explored in relation to ideas about fiction, journalism, drama, poetry, the New Woman, gothic, horror and the Victorian sage. Key Features *Detailed readings of key texts provide models of how to read critically *Demonstrates the interaction between genres to help think through modes of artistic experimentation and innovation in the period *Examines Neo-Victorian fiction, a popular genre today *Student resources include electronic and reference sources, further reading and an extensive glossary of key critical terms and historical issues
Chronology; Introduction to Victorian literature: Perspectives, Relationships, Contexts; Generic Traffic in Strangely Modern Places: Locating the Victorians (again); Observing 'Public Culture' in mid-Victorian Britain: an Ant colony, Ivy and Two Poets named 'Alfred'; 'Civilization and its Discontents': Productivity, Power and Governance in Dickens's Hard Times; Concluding Summary; 1: Novel Sensations in Early and Mid-Victorian Fiction: from 'Boz' to Middlemarch; Dickens the Novelist, Dickens the Journalist: Modes of Publication, Sketches, and the Making of The Old Curiosity Shop; Moving Sensations: Performing The Old Curiosity Shop; The Novel at mid-Century: Forming a Victorian Canon; Variable Sensations of the Real: Middlemarch; Concluding Summary; 2: Theatrical Exchanges: Gendered Subjectivity and Identity Trials in the Dramatic Imagination; Locating, Regulating and Expanding the Effects of 'Theatricality' in Victorian Culture; Melodrama and Public History: the Sexualized Conflicts of Empire in Boucicault's Jessie Brown; Masculinity, Melodrama and Mind: The Frozen Deep; Earnest Laughter, Queer Laughter: Fictive, Multiple identities in Farcical Dramas by Dickens and Wilde; Concluding Summary 3: Poetry: Dramatic Monologues and Critical Dialogues; Voicing Sensation in Tennyson and Browning: the Dramatic Monologue and Cultural Debate; Controversies of Faith: Doubt, Evolution and Love in a Modern Age; Making Women's Voices: Fairy Tales, Christian Tales, Old Wives' Tales; Concluding Summary 4: Victorians in Critical Time: Fin de Siecle and Sage-culture; Victorians at the end of Time: Thomas Hardy, New Women and Gothic; Horrors at the fin de siecle; Victorian Sages in Critical Time: Carlyle and Arnold; Concluding Summary; Conclusion: Neo-Victorianism, Postmodernism and Underground Cultures; Student Resources; Electronic sources and reference sources; Glossary; Guide to further reading; Index.
