Victorian England produced some of the greatest novelists in Western history, including Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot. Critical analysis focuses on the development of the Victorian novel through the second half of the 19th century.
With the character of the doctor as her subject, Tabitha Sparks follows the decline of the marriage plot in the Victorian novel. As Victorians came to terms with the scientific revolution in medicine of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the novel's progressive distance from the conventions of the marriage plot can be indexed through a rising identification of the doctor with scientific empiricism. A narrative's stance towards scientific reason, Sparks argues, is revealed by the fictional doctor's relationship to the marriage plot.
This stimulating study of Charlotte Bronte's novels draws on extensive original research in a range of early Victorian writings, on subjects ranging from women's day-dreaming to sanitary reform, from the Great Exhibition to early Victorian religious thought. It is not, however, merely a study of context.
British Liberalism and the United States: Political and Social Thought in the Late Victorian Age
While there are many works on British liberalism, this is the first to deal substantially with the transatlantic and international context of liberalism. Murney Gerlach considers the transatlantic thought of prominent contemporary figures such as William Gladstone, John Morley, William Harcourt, and Andrew Carnegie.
Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (Oxford English Monographs)
Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart is a significant and timely study of nineteenth-century poetry and poetics. It considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this period about the ability of poetry to act upon its readers.
