Argues against the repeated emphasis on literary form and for the artistic importance of literary content.

Key Concepts in Victorian Literature is a lively, clear and accessible resource for anyone interested in Victorian literature. It contains major facts, ideas and contemporary literary theories, is packed with close and detailed readings and offers an overview of the historical and cultural context in which this literature was produced.

Presents an analysis of nineteenth-century English fiction, focusing on objects found in three Victorian novels, arguing that these items have meanings the modern reader does not understand, but were clear to the Victorian reader.

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is a passionatedefense of Victorian literature’s enduring impact andimportance for readers interested in the relationship betweenliterature and life, reading and thinking. Explores the prominence of Victorian literature forcontemporary readers and academics, through the author’sunique insight into why it is still important today Provides new frames of interpretation for key Victorian worksof literature and close readings of important texts Argues for a new engagement with Victorian literature, fromgeneral readers and scholars alike Seeks to remove Victorian literature from an entrenched set ofvalues, traditions and perspectives - demonstrating how vital andresonant it is for modern literary and cultural analysis

The first collection of criticism devoted to the problem of reading in Victorian literature

Victorian Literary Mesmerism examines the engagement between literature and mesmerism in Victorian writing. Drawing on recent trends in interdisciplinary literary scholarship the essays collected here investigate the complex connections between scientific mesmerism, its manifestations in the Victorian social and cultural world, and the literary imagination. Here, for the first time, the varied themes and contexts shaped by mesmeric practices are brought together in one volume. Mesmerism’s influence on phrenology, medicine and mental health; its interaction with the occult and with communication technologies; the effects of mesmeric principles on gender and sexuality, as well as on criminal behaviour, are all set within the context of literary texts that interrogate and critique mesmerism’s influence on the Victorians. This volume will be of interest, therefore, to scholars of Victorian literature and the history of science, as well as to those interested in cultural history with a focus on gender, sexuality, and sciences of the mind.

What did reading mean to the Victorians? This question is the key point of departure for Reading and the Victorians, an examination of the era when reading underwent a swifter and more radical transformation than at any other moment in history. With book production handed over to the machines and mass education boosting literacy to unprecedented levels, the norms of modern reading were being established. Essays examine the impact of tallow candles on Victorian reading, the reading practices encouraged by Mudie's Select Library and feminist periodicals, the relationship between author and reader as reflected in manuscript revisions and corrections, the experience of reading women's diaries, models of literacy in Our Mutual Friend, the implications of reading marks in Victorian texts, how computer technology has assisted the study of nineteenth-century reading practices, how Gladstone read his personal library, and what contemporary non-academic readers might owe to Victorian ideals of reading and community. Reading forms a genuine meeting place for historians, literary scholars, theorists, librarians, and historians of the book, and this diverse collection examines nineteenth-century reading in all its personal, historical, literary, and material contexts, while also asking fundamental questions about how we read the Victorians' reading in the present day.

"The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel" is the first comprehensive study of Victorian novelists' use of the era's everyday culture and common knowledge in their writings. Victorian novelists knew that the men and women who bought and borrowed their books had an insatiable appetite for reading books about people like themselves in the instantly recognizable world in which they lived. They catered to this appetite by, among other devices, scattering through their pages allusions to people, places, and events in the news at the moment a novel was published, as well as to objects, scenes, and fashions that were particularly characteristic of the present-day setting. References to this body of common knowledge helped, in addition, to strengthen the intimate rapport with their readers that authors so much prized in the period, and they also contributed to the realistic effect that authenticated characters and scenes and thus encouraged readers' imaginative assent to the fiction. "The Presence of the Present" has been derived from approximately 150 novels of the era, from Pickwick Papers to Trollope's last novels and "The Mayor of Casterbridge." All the "great names" of Victorian fiction are here-Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Hardy, Meredith-as well as a representative selection of the less-than-great-Charles Reade, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Samuel Warren, and the unjustly neglected Robert Smith Surtees. The many illustrations, drawn principally form the "Illustrated London News" and "Punch" and from the novels themselves, re-create for a reader at the end of the twentieth century the same images that were evoked in the minds of the novels' first readers. The book, therefore, surveys that manner in which Victorian fiction draws upon the observations and experiences of the readers for whom the novelists wrote-not "posterity," but readers of the daily press and riders on the new railways. Here we meet the half-legendary figure of Stultz the fashionable tailor; learn about the messages conveyed at different times and on different social levels by cigar smoking and the wearing of gloves; discover the jokey career of the crinoline, the humors and corrupt practices of parliamentary elections, and scores of other topics that, when fully explained, help us to read with better understanding the living book of Victorian fiction. Richard D. Altick is Regents' Professor Emeritus of English at The Ohio State University. He is the author of numerous books, including "The English Common Reader, The Scholar Adventures, Victorian People and Ideas, The Shows of London, Paintings from Books, " and "Writers, Readers, and Occasions.""

The nineteenth-century sciences cleaved sensory experience into two separate realms: the bodily physics of sensation and the mental activity of perception. This division into two discrete categories was foundational to Victorian physics, physiology, and experimental psychology. As David Sweeney Coombs reveals, however, it was equally important to Victorian novelists, aesthetes, and critics, for whom the distinction between sensation and perception promised the key to understanding literature’s seemingly magical power to conjure up tastes, sights, touches, and sounds from the austere medium of print. In Victorian literature, science, and philosophy, the parallel between reading and perceiving gave rise to momentous debates about description as a mode of knowledge as well as how, and even whether, reading about the world differs from experiencing it firsthand. Examining novels and art criticism by George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater alongside scientific works by Hermann von Helmholtz, William James, and others, this book shows how Victorian literature offers us ways not just to touch but to grapple with the material realities that Clifford Geertz called the "hard surfaces of life."

Originally published in 1910, this book provides a detailed introduction to Victorian literature and the context in which it was created. The main body of the text analyses the general trends in poetry and prose during the period, providing individual chapters on major literary figures such as Tennyson, Browning, Dickens and Thackeray. Key aspects in Victorian thought are also discussed, covering a variety of philosophical, theological and scientific ideas. This is a fascinating text that will be of value to anyone with an interest in Victorian literature and the development of literary criticism.