1st Edition

Writing and Victorianism

By J.B. Bullen Copyright 1997
    354 Pages
    by Routledge

    354 Pages
    by Routledge

    Writing and Victorianism asks the fundamental question 'what is Victorianism?' and offers a number of answers taken from methods and approaches which have been developed over the last ten years. This collection of essays, written by both new and established scholars from Britain and the U.S.A, develops many of the themes of nineteenth-century studies which have lately come to the fore, touching upon issues such as drugs, class, power and gender. Some essays reflect the interaction of word and image in the nineteenth-century, and the notion of the city as spectacle; others look at Victorian science finding a connection between writing and the growth of psychology and psychiatry on the one hand and with the power of scientific materialism on the other.

    As well as key figures such as Dickens, Tennyson and Wilde, a host of new names are introduced including working-class writers attempting to define themselves and writers in the Periodical press who, once anonymous, exercised a great influence over Victorian politics, taste, and social ideals. From these observations there emerges a need for self-definition in Victorian writing. History, ancestry, and the past all play their part in figuring the present in the nineteenth-century, and many of these studies foreground the problem of literary, social, and psychological identity.











    Preface Introduction 1. Transition and Tradition: The Preoccupation with Ancestry in Victorian Writing, Sophie Gilmartin 2. The Major Silence: Autobiographies of Working Women in the Nineteenth-century, Carol Jenkins 3. Writing, Cultural Production and the Periodical Press in the Nineteenth-century, Laurel Brake 4. Engendering Vision in the Victorian Male Poet, Catherine Maxwell 5. Victorian Lucretius: Tennyson and the Problem of Scientific Romanticism, Patricia O'Neill 6. The Opium-eater as Criminal in Victorian Writing, Julian North 7. Obscure Recesses: Locating the Victorian Unconscious, Jenny Bourne Taylor 8. After the Play: Dreams of Drama and Death in the James Family, Frances Wilson 9. Visuality Codes and Texts: Charles Dickens's Pictures from Italy, Stephen Bann 10. John Ruskin and the Victorian Landscape, Phillip Mallett 11. A Life in Writing: Ruskin and the Uses of Suburbia, Dinah Birch 12. Figuring the Body in the Victorian Novel, J.B Bullen 13. The Victorian Novel as a Self-conscious Allusion, .Bernard Richards 14. Plotting the Victorians: Narrative, Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction, Kate Flint 15. Oscar Wilde at Centuries' End, Neil Sammells Notes on Contributors Select Bibliography Index

    Biography

    J. B. Bullen is Professor Emeritus at the University of Reading, UK.