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An accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the era, this Companion explores influential dramatic works by Ibsen, Shaw and Wilde; the poetry of mourning; novelistic genres, including social problem novels and sensation fiction; and the literature of the fin de siècle’s aesthetes and decadents. Cultural and historical debates – focussing on empire, national identity, science and evolution, print culture and gender – supply essential context alongside discussion of relevant critical theory.
List of contents
- Part One – Introduction
- Part Two – A Cultural Overview
- Part Three – Texts, Writers and Contexts
- Victorian Poetry – Memory and Mourning: The Brownings, Swinburne and Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- Extended commentary: Tennyson, In Memoriam
- The Social Problem Novel: Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley and Elizabeth Gaskell
- Extended Commentary: Gaskell, North and South (1855)
- The Provincial or Regional Novel: Anthony Trollope, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy
- Extended Commentary: Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd
- Sensation Fiction: Wilkie Collins, Ellen Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon
- Extended Commentary: Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
- Victorian Drama: Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw
- Extended Commentary: Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893)
- Aesthetes and Decadents: Walter Pater, Arthur Symonds, J. K. Huysmans and Oscar Wilde
- Extended Commentary: Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
- Part Four: Critical theories and Debates
- Reader Reception and the popular author
- New women, New Readers
- The Literature of Empire and National Identity
- Science, Eugenics and Evolution
- Part Five – References and resources
- Timeline
- Further reading
- Index
About the author
Dr Beth Palmer is lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey (from September 2010). Her teaching interests are wide-ranging and she has taught British and American literature from the 18th to 21st centuries with particular interests in Victorian fiction, women's writing, and the Bronte sisters. Her research interests have centred around Victorian fiction, print culture and the press, readership and women's writing. Forthcoming publications are Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies (Oxford University Press, 2011) and A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850-1900, eds Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland (Ashgate, 2011). She is currently developing a new research project on the relationship between the popular theatre and the Victorian novel and is also interested in neo-Victorian fiction.
Summary
An accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the era, this companion explores influential dramatic works by Ibsen, Shaw and Wilde; the poetry of mourning; novelistic genres, including social problem novels and sensation fiction; and the literature of the fin de siècle’s aesthetes and decadents. Cultural and historical debates – focussing on empire, national identity, science and evolution, print culture and gender – supply essential context alongside discussion of relevant critical theory.
