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 Bernice Chitnis
December 13, 2017
First published in 1991, this book radically challenged the view of Nana as the story of an old fashioned femme fatale and reinterprets her as a feminist heroine who manages to overturn patriarchy. The author shows how Nana confronts the traditional social order and offers an alternative version. ...
By Jeremy Smith
December 13, 2017
First published in 1988, the aim of this study is to define the role of religious meaning in the modern novel and to demonstrate that the novel can successfully express a religious feeling, but not a religious commitment. Through the analysis of four novels by Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Werfel and ...
By Barbara Arnett Melchiori
December 13, 2017
First published in 1985, this book looks at the ways in which the spate of terrorist activity in the 1880s was reflected in the novels of the time. Oscar Wilde, George Gissing, Henry James and George Bernard Shaw among others gave the terrorist venture a position in one or more of their novels. ...
Edited
By David Skilton
December 13, 2017
The Victorian period was the age of the novel and critics at the time clearly saw the importance of prose fiction. First published in 1993, this anthology contains over fifty original extracts from contemporary critics on the early and mid-Victorian novel. Arranged thematically, the volume covers ...
By George Watt
December 13, 2017
A sympathetic view of the fallen women in Victorian England begins in the novel. First published in 1984, this book shows that the fallen woman in the nineteenth-century novel is, amongst other things, a direct response to the new society. Through the examination of Dickens, Gaskell, Collins, Moore...
By John Lucas
December 13, 2017
First published in 1977, this book studies three important nineteenth-century novelists: Mrs Gaskell, William Hale White and Thomas Hardy. They are all provincial novelists who wrote about social change and the attendant problems and pressures this brought with it. Unlike previous critics, who have...
By John Lucas
December 13, 2017
First published in 1980, this book surveys Dickens’ growing power to drive deep into the causes of his contemporary conditions. It reveals the importance of nature to Dickens as a rich metaphor of human freedom and potentiality, and emphasises his concern with time and the problems of freedom. The ...
By David Grylls
December 13, 2017
First published 1986. In this book the author refutes the notion that Gissing’s weaknesses as a novelist are associated with defects in his personality and argues that the power of his writing stemmed from his divided character. Gissing’s permanently divided emotions on poverty, reformism, women ...
By Brian V. Street
December 13, 2017
First published in 1975, this study is concerned with the representation of non-European people in English popular fiction in the period from 1858-1920. It examines the developments in thinking about people across the world and shows how they affected writers’ views of evolution, race, heredity and...
Edited
By Kate Flint
December 13, 2017
First published in 1987. Many Victorian novels that considered social problems made extensive use of contemporary source material for their descriptions. This book aims to provide a greater acquaintance with this non-literary material — illustrating and exemplifying issues that the authors treated ...
By Peter Keating
December 13, 2017
First published in 1971. The book examines the presentation of the urban and industrial working classes in Victorian fiction. It considers the different types of working men and women who appear in fiction, the environments they are shown to inhabit, and the use of phonetics to indicate the sound ...
Edited
By David Howard, John Lucas, John Goode
December 13, 2017
First published in 1966, this book collects six essays which discuss the experience of social change as it reveals itself in the work of several nineteenth century novelists. In the novels studied, and the discussion of fiction that follows, the authors argue that all these novelists’ attempts to ...