Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction - Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel

Explores the journalism and fiction appearing in the early Victorian working-class periodical press and its influence on mainstream literature.

List of contents

Introduction: can a social problem speak?; 1. Social inheritance in the New Poor Law debate: William Cobbett, Harriet Martineau, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry; 2. Books of (social) murder: melodrama and the slow violence of the market in anti-New Poor Law satire, fiction, and journalism; 3. A life in fragments: Thomas Cooper's Chartist Bildungsroman; 4. Questions from workers who read: education and self-formation in Chartist print culture and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton; 5. Revenge in the age of insurance: villainy in theatrical melodrama and Ernest Jones's fiction; 6. 'Outworks of the citadel of corruption': the Chartist Press reports the empire; 7. Two nations revisited: the refugee question in the People's Paper, Household Words and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.

About the author

Gregory Vargo is Assistant Professor at New York University. His published essays have appeared in Victorian Studies and Victorian Literature and Culture. He has held fellowships from the Fulbright program, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mrs Giles Whiting Foundation. With Rob Breton, he is the creator of Chartist Fiction, a bibliographic database of over 1000 reviews and stories that appeared in over twenty-five Chartist periodicals.

Summary

The radical press of the Victorian era fostered daring literary experiments that helped shape mainstream literature. This book adds significantly to the study of Victorian literary culture by exploring the interplay between canonical social problem novels and journalism and fiction appearing in the periodical press associated with working-class protest.

Product details

• Authors: Greg Vargo, Gregory Vargo, Gregory (New York University) Vargo
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.12.2017
• EAN: 9781107197855
• ISBN: 978-1-107-19785-5
• No. of pages: 298
• Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature & Culture; Cambridge Studies in Nineteent; Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; English, Ireland, United Kingdom, Great Britain, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literature: history and criticism