Böcker i Victorian Literature & Culture-serien

This study uses 19th-century urban fiction - in particular the novels of Hugo and Dickens - to define a genre: the novel of urban mysteries. He argues that within these extravagant but fact-obsessed narratives the archaic form of allegory became a means for understanding modern cities.

This volume studies Victorian female protagonists who participate in the public universe conventionally occupied by men. The author examines classical novels by female authors in relation to each other and to developments in the emerging British women's movement.

In this text, Schaffer analyzes writers such as Lucas Malet, Ouida, Alice Meynell, Rosamund Marriott Watson and Una Ashworth Taylor. These women used aestheticism to forge a compromise between the two models of female identity available to them - the New Woman and the Angel in the House.

A definitive study of an author who in celebrating one era helped usher in the next. In this critical examination, the author sees Mary Arnold Ward as being ""behind her times"" in two senses - in her tireless defense of her evolving era's achievements and intentions, but also in her wariness of the advance of time and of the violence of change.

Taking as his point of departure the competing uses of the critical term, the materiality of writing, the author turns to the past in this provocative book to recover the ways in which the multiple aspects of writing now conjured by that term were represented and related to one another in the mid-nineteenth century.

Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style analyses the strengths and failures of her poetry, its attention to rhythm and the shifts of diction, its momentum and reserve, and the rationale for its revision. It also explores Rossetti's poetry for children, her reconfiguration of religion and poetry and the influences of female precursors she admired.

Christina Rossetti has come to be considered one of the major poets. ""The Letters of Christina Rossetti"" makes available all of her extant letters, almost two-thirds of which have never before been published. These letters come from over 100 private and institutional collections. The fourth and final volume covers the last eight years of her life.

The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was a practitioner of strict asceticism, and his commentators have often approved or disapproved of his rigorous self-discipline. This study uses Lacanian theories of sublimation and courtly love to reconfigure this rift in the field of Hopkins criticism.

This analysis probes the nature of place and the structuring of desire in Tennyson's poetry. Focusing on the poet's early writings - fragments and poems produced between 1824 and 1833 - the author conflates desconstructive theory with psychoanalytic insights.

Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904) was one of the most important 19th century British writers and activists. She worked to improve conditions for delinquent girls and for the sick poor, promoted university degrees for women and roused support for the Union during the American Civil War. This is her biography.