Victorian fiction has been read and analyzed from a wide range of perspectives in the past century. But how did the novelists themselves read and respond to each other's creations when they first appeared? Jerome Meckier answers that intriguing question in this ground-breaking study of what he terms the Victorian realism wars. Meckier argues that nineteenth-century British fiction should be seen as a network of intersecting reactions and counteractions in which the novelists rethought and rewrote each other's novels as a way of enhancing their own credibility. In an increasingly relative world, thanks to the triumph of a scientific secularity, the goal of the novelist was to establish his or her own credentials as a realist, hence a reliable social critic, by undercutting someone else's—usually Charles Dickens's. Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, and especially George Eliot attempted to make room for themselves in the 1850s and 1860s by pushing Dickens aside. Wilkie Collins tried a different form of parodic revaluation: he strove to outdo Dickens at the kind of novel Dickens thought he did best, the kind his other rivals tried to cancel, tone down, or repair, ostensibly for being too melodramatic but actually for expressing too negative a world view. For his part, Dickens—determined to remain inimitable—replied to all of his rivals by redoing them as spiritedly as they had reused his characters and situations to make their own statements and to discredit his. Thus Meckier redefines Victorian realism as the bravura assertion by a major novelist (or one soon to be) that he or she was a better realist than Dickens. By suggesting the ways Victorian novelist read and rewrote each other's work, this innovative study alters present day perceptions of such double-purpose novels as Felix Holt, Bleak House, Middlemarch, North and South, Hard Times, The Woman in White, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Religious issues played a prominent role in Victorian England and had a profound influence on the culture of that period. In Theology And The Victorian Novel, J. Russell Perkin shows that even the apparently secular world of the realist novel is shaped by the theological debates of its time. Beginning with a wide-ranging introduction that explains why a theological reading of Victorian fiction is both rewarding and timely, Perkin also addresses religion's return to prominence in the twenty-first century, confounding earlier predictions of its imminent demise. Chapters on William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy are followed by a concluding discussion of Mary Ward and Walter Pater that relates Pater's Marius the Epicurean to postmodern theology and shows how it remains a religious classic for our own time. Informed by extensive knowledge of the religion and culture of the period, Theology And The Victorian Novel significantly alters the way that the Victorian novel should be read.

Reading the Victorian Novel is a clear and engaging introduction to Victorian fiction. In this book, Annette Federico invites readers to turn their attention to the bursting imaginations and formal inventiveness of Victorian novelists themselves. Five conventions prevailed in the building of a Victorian novel: serialisation, narration, plotting, description, and characterization. Each chapter is rich in examples of these practices and attentive to the historical and cultural contexts that shaped them, as well as to the responses and judgments of Victorian readers and contemporary scholars. Federico keeps the focus on the writer’s choices and the reader’s experience––on the meeting of minds and imaginations against the backdrop of history. Reading the Victorian Novel is an appreciative and discerning guide for anyone with an interest in the resonant and vibrant worlds of nineteenth-century fiction.

This is the first book-length study of the fictional autobiography, a subgenre that is at once widely recognizable and rarely examined as a literary form with its own history and dynamics of interpretation. Heidi L. Pennington shows that the narrative form and genre expectations associated with the fictional autobiography in the Victorian period engages readers in a sustained meditation on the fictional processes that construct selfhood both in and beyond the text. Through close readings of Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and other well-known examples of the subgenre, Pennington shows how the Victorian fictional autobiography subtly but persistently illustrates that all identities are fictions. Despite the subgenre’s radical implications regarding the nature of personal identity, fictional autobiographies were popular in their own time and continue to inspire devotion in readers. This study sheds new light on what makes this subgenre so compelling, up to and including in the present historical moment of precipitous social and technological change. As we continue to grapple with the existential question of what determines “who we really are,” this book explores the risks and rewards of embracing conscious acts of fictional self-production in an unstable world.

This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.

This interdisciplinary study argues for the vital importance of visual culture as a force shaping the Victorian novel's formal development and reading history. It shows how authors like Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Wilkie Collins and Thomas Hardy borrowed language and conceptual formations from art world spaces - the art market, the museum, the large-scale exhibition, and art critical discourse - not only when they chose certain subjects or refined certain aspects of realism, but also when they tried to adapt various genres of the novel for a new and newly vociferous mass audience. Quandaries specific to new forms of public display affected authors' sense of their relationship with their own public. Debates about how best to appreciate a new mass of visual information impacted authors' sense of how people read, and consequently the development of particular novel forms like the multi-plot novel, the historical novel, the sensation novel, and fin-de-siècle fiction.

This interdisciplinary collection presents new research on the Brontës' intense and varied relationship to the wider world of the arts. With essays by scholars who represent the fields of literary studies, music, art, theatre studies, and material culture, the volume brings together the strongest current research and suggests areas for future work on the Brontës and their cultural contexts.

Placing the popular genre of neo-Victorian fiction within the context of the contemporary cultural fascination with the Victorians, this book argues that these novels are distinguished by a commitment to historical specificity and understands them within their contemporary context and the context of Victorian historical and literary narratives.

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.