1st Edition

Annoying the Victorians

By James Kincaid Copyright 1995

    What happens when bad criticism happens to good people? Annoying the Victorians sets the tradition of critical discourse and literary criticism on its ear, as well as a few other areas. James Kincaid brings his witty, erudite and thoroughly cynical self to the Victorians, and they will never read (or be read) quite the same.

    Chapter 1 The Part Before The First Part; Part 1 Dickensian Jugglers; Chapter 1a Fattening Up on Pickwick; Chapter 2 Little Nell—She Dead; Chapter 3 Viewing and Blurring with Dickens; Chapter 4 All the Wickedness in the World Is Print Dickens and Subversive Interpretation; Chapter 5 Performance, Roles, the Self, and Our Own Charles Dickens; Part 2 Interlude I; Chapter 7 Who Is Relieved By the Idea of Comic Relief?; Part 3 Poets And Propriety; Chapter 6 Forgetting to Remember Tennyson's Happy Losses; Chapter 7a Tennyson, Hallam's Corpse, Milton's Murder, and Poetic Exhibitionism, Buck McMullen; Chapter 8 The Poem Says Meredith's Modern Love; Chapter 9 The Canonical Poetry of The Pearl; Part 4 Interlude II; Chapter 12 H. Rider Haggard's The Return of 'She'; Part 5 Fictional Strippers; Chapter 10 Words Cannot Express Frankenstein's Tripping on the Tongue; Chapter 11 Anthony Trollope and the Unmannerly Novel; Chapter 12a The Power of Barchester Towers; Chapter 13 Girl-Watching, Child-Beating, and Other Exercises for Readers of Jude the Obscure; Chapter 17 Afterword;

    Biography

    James Kincaid is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, (1992).