This set of 42 volumes, originally published between 1965 and 2009, are authored by renowned international scholars in the field of nineteenth century literature. They explore a variety of authors such as Dickens, Hardy, Brontë, Austen, Gaskell, Zola, Meredith, Eliot, Gissing, Hawthorne, James and Wharton. The titles also examine a wide range of themes including gender, class, religion, politics, philosophy and music.
By Michael Irwin
January 03, 2018
First published in 1979. Most of the great nineteenth century novelists strove to render in words the people and places that they invented and most readers of fiction picture in their imagination these characters and scenes. This book investigates both types of ‘picturing’, exploring the principles...
By Robin Gilmour
January 03, 2018
First published in 1981, this book represents the first comprehensive examination of Victorian society’s preoccupation with the ‘notion of the gentleman’ and how this was reflected in the literature of the time. Starting with Addison and Lord Chesterfield, the author explores the influence of the ...
By Jean-Pierre Barricelli
December 22, 2017
First published in 1990, this book was the first comprehensive study of Balzac’s relationship to music, blending past scholarship with new perspectives to formulate an inclusive account. It begins by examining the contacts and experiences that shaped the musical side of Balzac’s life. These left ...
By Everett Knight
December 13, 2017
First published in 1969, this book asserts that two concepts, structure and praxis, make it impractical for scholars to ignore the necessity of a theory of the novel — with the term ‘classical novel’ used to cover western fiction. The author argues that the novel is fundamentally an ‘enterprise’ — ...
By P.D. Edwards
December 13, 2017
First published in 1968, this book sets out to refute the idea of Trollope as a ‘mild cathedral-town novelist, describing storms in ecclesiastical tea cups’ which prevailed at the time in spite of his stature during his lifetime. The author reveals the full strength and range of Trollope’s ...
By Arthur Pollard
December 13, 2017
Anthony Trollope is perhaps best known for the group of Barsetshire novels, a rich and enduring picture of society in a small cathedral town. He also wrote a number of Irish novels and a series about political society known as the ‘Palliser novels’. First published in 1978, this introduction to ...
By Graham Daldry
December 13, 2017
First published in 1987. While there have been commentaries on his humour, his seriousness, his social concerns, and other specific aspects of his work such accounts have only tended to divide our understanding of the novels, to lead us to see them as failures of artistic unity. In this book the ...
By Christine DeVine
December 13, 2017
First published in 2005, this book argues that, due to political and ideological shifts in the last decades of the nineteenth century a new depiction of social class was possible in the English novel. Late-century writers such as Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells question the middle-class Victorian ...
By Janet Horowitz Murray
December 13, 2017
First published in 1987, these essays deal with the three major novels of George Meredith. It explores in particular Meredith’s feminism and demonstrates how each novel embodies his very modern views of the relations between the sexes. This book will be of interest to those studying 19th Century ...
By Paul Schlicke
December 13, 2017
First published in 1985. Dickens was a vigorous champion of the right of all men and women to carefree amusements and dedicated himself to the creation of imaginative pleasure. This book represents the first extended study of this vital aspect of Dickens’ life and work, exploring how he channelled ...
By Joseph Gardner
December 13, 2017
First published in 1988, this book looks at the enormous impact Dickens’ writings had on American novelists in the second half of the nineteenth century. Dickens dominated not only popular taste but the American novel for sixty years and the author argues that even the most original writers showed ...
By Thom Braun
December 13, 2017
First published in 1981, this book attempts to approach a better understanding of Disraeli the man through his life as a novelist. It is not a series of literary criticisms, rather an attempt to see how ‘fiction’ and the act of ‘fictionalising’ played an important part in Disraeli’s life. The ...