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This book is about selected Victorian texts and authors that in many cases have never before been subject to sustained scholarly attention. Taking inspiration from the pioneeringly capacious approach to the hidden hinterland of Victorian fiction adopted by scholars like John Sutherland and Franco Moretti, this energetically revisionist volume takes advantage of recent large-scale digitisation projects that allow unprecedented access to hitherto neglected literary texts and archives. Blending lively critical engagement with individual texts and close attention to often surprising trends in the production and reception of prose fiction across the Victorian era, this book will be of use to anyone interested in re-evaluating the received meta-narratives of Victorian literary history. With an afterword by John Sutherland
List of contents
Introduction: Exploring the Hinterland of Victorian Fiction; Daragh Downes and Trish Ferguson.- Chapter 2. Prize Novelists and Condensed Novels: Thackeray and Bret Harte; Michael Slater.- Chapter 3. Before New Grub Street: Thomas Miller and the Contingencies of Authorship; Adam Abraham.- Chapter 4. Emboldening the Weak: the Early Fiction of James Anthony Froude; Ciaran Brady.- Chapter 5. George Borrow: The Scholar, The Gipsy, The Priest; Monika Mazurek.- Chapter 6. Sensation Fiction as Social Activism: Charles Reade's It Is Never Too Late to Mend and Felicia Skene's Hidden Depths; Elizabeth Andrews.- Chapter 7. Sheer Luck, Holmes? Clues towards Canon Formation in Victorian Detective Fiction; Daragh Downes.- Chapter 8.Politics of the Strange and Unusual: Mesmerism and the Medical Professional in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 'Dr Carrick' (1878); Samantha J. M. Aliu.-Chapter 9. Silas K. Hocking, Her Benny, and the Poetics of the Prolific; Christopher Pittard.- Chapter 10. Henry Hawley Smart's The Great Tontine and the Art of Book-making; Trish Ferguson.- Chapter 11. Performative Politics and Gendered Geography in Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction; Ailise Bulfin.- Chapter 13. Dat Cura Commodum or A Portrait of a Deviant Mind: Arthur Griffiths's The Rome Express, John Milne's 'The Express Series' and Late Victorian Detective Fiction; Paul Raphael Rooney.- Bibliography.-
About the author
Trish Ferguson is Senior Lecturer in the English Department of Liverpool Hope University, UK. She is the author of Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions (2013) and the editor of Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Daragh Downes is a Teaching Fellow in English and German at Trinity College Dublin. His chief English research interest is Charles Dickens and his milieu.
Summary
This book is about selected Victorian texts and authors that in many cases have never before been subject to sustained scholarly attention. Taking inspiration from the pioneeringly capacious approach to the hidden hinterland of Victorian fiction adopted by scholars like John Sutherland and Franco Moretti, this energetically revisionist volume takes advantage of recent large-scale digitisation projects that allow unprecedented access to hitherto neglected literary texts and archives. Blending lively critical engagement with individual texts and close attention to often surprising trends in the production and reception of prose fiction across the Victorian era, this book will be of use to anyone interested in re-evaluating the received meta-narratives of Victorian literary history. With an afterword by John Sutherland
Report
"The essays in Victorian Fiction Beyond the Canon are consistently absorbing and, collectively, they make a strong and urgent case for the need to study the work of the other 99.5 percent." (Grace Moore, Victorian Studies, Vol. 62 (1), 2019)
