A History of Victorian LiteratureISBN: 978-0-470-67239-6
Paperback
480 pages
January 2012, Wiley-Blackwell
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Note on Citations xv
Introduction: Locating Victorian Literature 1
Byron is Dead 1
Cultural Contexts 2
The Literary Field 11
An Age of Prose 14
The Situation of Poetry 19
Victorian Theater 21
The Novel After Scott 22
1 "The Times are Unexampled": Literature in the Age of Machinery, 1830–1850 27
Constructing the Man of Letters 27
The Burdens of Poetry 33
Theater in the 1830s 48
Fiction in the Early 1830s 50
Dickens and the Forms of Fiction 55
Poetry after the Annuals 66
Literature of Travel 70
History and Heroism 73
Social Crisis and the Novel 81
The Domestic Ideal 84
From Silver-Fork to Farce 86
Poetry in the Early 1840s 89
The Literature of Labor 95
Medievalism 98
"The Two Nations" 101
"What's Money After All?" 111
Romance and Religion 116
The Novel of Development 123
Art, Politics, and Faith 127
In Memoriam 137
2 Crystal Palace and Bleak House: Expansion and Anomie, 1851–1873 143
The Novel and Society 145
Crimea and the Forms of Heroism 156
Empire 164
Spasmodics and Other Poets 168
The Power of Art 182
Realisms 187
Two Guineveres 194
Sensation 200
Dreams of Self-Fashioning 207
Narrating Nature: Darwin 215
Novels and their Audiences 218
Literature for Children 228
Poetry in the Early 1860s 232
Criticism and Belief 244
The Pleasures of the Difficult 250
The Hellenic Tradition 259
Domesticity, Politics, Empire, and the Novel 267
After Dickens 275
The Persistence of Epic 282
Poisonous Honey and Fleshly Poetry 286
3 The Rise of Mass Culture and the Specter of Decline, 1873–1901 293
Science, Materialism, and Value 296
Twilight of the Poetic Titans 305
The Decline of the Marriage Plot 314
The Aesthetic Movement 325
Aesthetic Poetry 329
Life-Writing 333
Morality and the Novel 342
Romance 351
Regionalism 356
The Arrival of Kipling 360
Fiction and the Forms of Belief 365
Sex, Science, and Danger 370
Fictions of the Artist 375
Decadence 377
Drama in the 1880s 381
The New Woman in Fiction 386
Decadent Form 394
The Poetry of London 400
Yeats 405
The Scandal of Wilde 408
Poetry After Wilde 411
Fictions of Decline 416
Conrad 423
Epilogue 429
Works Cited 435
Index 451
