First published in 2006, this work is a valuable guide for the researcher in Victorian Studies. Updated to include electronic resources, this book provides guides to catalogs, archives, museums, collections and databases containing material on the Victorian period. It organises the vast array of reference sources by discipline to help researchers tailor their investigations.

Selected as an 'Outstanding Academic Title' in the 2008 CHOICE awards, The Victorian Studies Reader gathers together, in one volume, some of the key pieces on Victorian history, society and culture. The book draws on new trends in looking at the Victorian Age and includes sections on: periodization politics consumerism intellectual life sexuality empire The Victorian Studies Reader is a rich resource, essential for all those studying this important period of history.

This book explores the recall of the Victorians, displayed by select novels ranging in time from Rhys s Wide Sargasso Sea (1996) to A. S. Byatt s Possession: A Romance (1990). These Victorianist novels are complex studies of Victorian literature, society and modes of representation.

This study, first published in 1980, argues that higher education for women was accepted by the end of the nineteenth-century, and higher education was becoming a desirable preparation for teachers in girls’ schools. By accepting the opponents’ claim that higher education for women had the potential to revolutionise relations between the sexes, this fascinating book demonstrates how the relevance of the nineteenth-century serves to enhance our understanding of the contemporary women’s movement. This title will be of interest to students of history and education.

Lists editions, books, articles, and dissertation abstracts published from 1945 to 1999 on every field of nineteenth-century British studies

Bringing together neo-Victorian and medievalism scholars in dialogue with each other for the first time, this collection of essays foregrounds issues common to both fields. The Victorians reimagined the medieval era and post-Victorian medievalism repurposes received nineteenth century tropes, as do neo-Victorian texts. For example, aesthetic movements such as Arts and Crafts, which looked for inspiration in the medieval era, are echoed by steampunk in its return to Victorian dress and technology. Issues of gender identity, sexuality, imperialism and nostalgia arise in both neo-Victorianism and medievalism, and analysis of such texts is enriched and expanded by the interconnections between the two fields represented in this groundbreaking collection.

In Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel, Vanessa L. Ryan demonstrates how both the form and the experience of reading novels played an important role in ongoing debates about the nature of consciousness during the Victorian era. Revolutionary developments in science during the mid- and late nineteenth century—including the discoveries and writings of Herbert Spencer, William Carpenter, and George Henry Lewes—had a vital impact on fiction writers of the time. Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Henry James read contributions in what we now call cognitive science that asked, "what is the mind?" These Victorian fiction writers took a crucial step, asking how we experience our minds, how that experience relates to our behavior and questions of responsibility, how we can gain control over our mental reflexes, and finally how fiction plays a special role in understanding and training our minds. Victorian fiction writers focus not only on the question of how the mind works but also on how it seems to work and how we ought to make it work. Ryan shows how the novelistic emphasis on dynamic processes and functions—on the activity of the mind, rather than its structure or essence—can also be seen in some of the most exciting and comprehensive scientific revisions of the understanding of "thinking" in the Victorian period. This book studies the way in which the mind in the nineteenth-century view is embedded not just in the body but also in behavior, in social structures, and finally in fiction.

This book investigates how decolonising the curriculum might work in English studies — one of the fields that bears the most robust traces of its imperial and colonial roots — from the perspective of the semi-periphery of the academic world- system. It takes the University of Lisbon as a point of departure to explore broader questions of how the field can be rethought from within, through Anglophone (post)coloniality and an institutional location in a department of English, while also considering forces from without, as the arguments in this book issue from a specific, liminal positionality outside the Anglosphere. The first half of the book examines the critical practice of and the political push for decolonising the university and the curriculum, advancing existing scholarship with this focus on semi-peripheral perspectives. The second half comprises two theoretically-informed and classroom-oriented case studies of adaptation of the literary canon, a part of model syllabi that are designed to raise awareness of and encourage an understanding of a global, pluriversal literary history.