ENG 346: 19th-Century Literature: Victorian

This new study explores how evangelicalism played a vital role in the development of the Victorian novel. In contrast to those who see the evangelical movement as trivial to our histories of the novel and part of the losing side in religion's battle with secularity, Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel examines fiction by major writers of the nineteenth century and reveals the extent to which the novel was shaped by evangelical thought and practice.

In Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820-1900, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein analyzes the ways in which Christian novelists across the denominational spectrum laid claim to popular genres to narrate the aftershocks of 1829, the year of Catholic Emancipation. Victorian Reformations is the first book to analyze how "high" theological and historical debates over the Reformation's significance were popularized through the increasingly profitable venue of Victorian religious fiction.

This volume covers the flowering of Victorian literature, from the decade when Tennyson started writing In Memoriam and Darwin embarked on the Beagle to the publication of Hardy's first great novels and the death of George Eliot. The Victorians: 1830-1880 will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all keen readers of English fiction.

Adrian Poole's major new study is the first to present a fully comprehensive view of what Shakespeare meant to the Victorian period as a whole. He examines the Victorian's obsession with Shakespeare, his impact upon the era's consciousness, and the expression of this in their drama, novels and poetry. The book features detailed discussion of the interpretations and applications of Shakespeare by major figures such as Dickens and Hardy, Tennyson and Browning, as well as those less well-known.

Victorian Contexts is a volume of imaginative and refreshing essays on the similarities and shared themes of the literature, painting, architecture, and crafts of the nineteenth century. Explaining the value of such an intertextual approach, Murray Roston argues that in every generation there is a central complex of inherited assumptions and urgent contemporary concerns to which each creative artist responds in his or her individual way.

In a work that is uniquely comprehensive and theoretically astute, Isobel Armstrong rescues Victorian poetry from its longstanding sepia image as 'a moralised form of romantic verse', and unearths its often subversive critique of nineteenth-century culture and politics. Victorian Poetry is a major re-evaluation of the genre by one of the foremost scholars of the period.