The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to a thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics as well as essays on topics often overlooked.

Much has been written about the Victorian novel, and for good reason. The cultural power it exerted (and, to some extent, still exerts) is beyond question. The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to this thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics (the novel and science, the Victorian Bildungroman) as well as essays on topics often overlooked (the novel and classics, the novel and the OED, the novel, and allusion). Manifesting the increasing interdisciplinarity of Victorian studies, its essays situate the novel within a complex network of relations (among, for instance, readers, editors, reviewers, and the novelists themselves; or among different cultural pressures - the religious, the commercial, the legal). The handbook's essays also build on recent bibliographic work of remarkable scope and detail, responding to the growing attention to print culture. With a detailed introduction and 36 newly commissioned chapters by leading and emerging scholars -- beginning with Peter Garside's examination of the early nineteenth-century novel and ending with two essays proposing the 'last Victorian novel' -- the handbook attends to the major themes in Victorian scholarship while at the same time creating new possibilities for further research. Balancing breadth and depth, the clearly-written, nonjargon -laden essays provide readers with overviews as well as original scholarship, an approach which will serve advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars. As the Victorians get further away from us, our versions of their culture and its novel inevitably change; this Handbook offers fresh explorations of the novel that teach us about this genre, its culture, and, by extension, our own.

This study offers readings of six Victorian novels to illustrate how texts encode assumptions and social meaning, and offers a detailed basis for the theorizing of the relationship between language and ideology.

Historical fiction is as popular today as it was at its birth in the nineteenth century. The imaginative recreation of a period beyond living memory has a power to evoke the past better than any history textbook. The stories in this collection travel in time from pre-history and the ancient Greeks to Regency bucks and Edwardian suffragettes, by way of medieval Europe, the English Civil War and the French Revolution. Emperors and kings, poets and soldiers walk these pages, in tales of intrigue, adventure, mystery and romance. As well as the giants of the genre - Stanley Weyman, Rafael Sabatini, and Georgette Heyer among them - this anthology also includes tales by Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner and Marjorie Bowen, and by writers from the golden age of the Victorian magazine. In their choices the editors demonstrate the vitality of a form that cuts across the boundaries of popular and literary fiction to appeal to anyone who enjoys a cracking good read.

This unique two-volume work is organized into two parts. Part I is a substantial series of introductory essays-over forty essays offer generic histories of the subject as well as surveys of the history of the book around the world, including the Muslim world, Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Part II of the companion comprises an A-Z section of over 5,000 entries on every aspect of this exceptionally rich and diverse subject, ranging from brief definitions and biographical entries to more extensive treatments. Both parts of the text are richly illustrated with reproductions, diagrams, maps, and examples of various typographical features. --publisher's description.