The Victorian Novel

The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to a thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics as well as essays on topics often overlooked.

Victorian England produces some the the greatest novelists in Western history, including Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot. Critical analysis focuses on the development of the Victorian novel through the second half of the 19th century.

A new edition of this standard work, fully updated with four brand new chapters.

How to Read the Victorian Novel unpicks our comfortable expectations of the genre to fully explore just how unfamiliar its familiarity is: emphasizing the complexity and contradictions in Victorian writers' attempts to deal with a world heading into modernity at full speed.

This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.

The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel traces the the story of victimized childhood to its origins in nineteenth-century Britain. Almost as soon as "childhood" became a distinct category, Laura C. Berry contends, stories of children in danger were circulated as part of larger debates about child welfare and the role of the family in society. Berry examines the nineteenth-century fascination with victimized children to show how novels and reform writings reorganize ideas of self and society as narratives of childhood distress. Focusing on classic childhood stories such as Oliver Twist and novels that are not conventionally associated with particular social problems, such as Dickens's Dombey and Son, the Brontë sisters' Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot's Adam Bede, Berry shows the ways in which fiction that purports to deal with private life, particularly the domain of the family, nevertheless intervenes in public and social debates. At the same time she examines medical, legal, charitable, and social-relief writings to show how these documents provide crucial sources in the development of social welfare and modern representations of the family.

By tracing the rise of the New Man alongside novelistic changes in the representations of marriage, MacDonald shows how this figure encouraged Victorian writers to reassess masculine behaviour and to re-imagine the marriage plot in light of wider social changes. She finds examples in novels by Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot and George Gissing.

Taking as his point of departure the competing uses of the critical term the materiality of writing, Daniel Hack turns to the past in this provocative new book to recover the ways in which the multiple aspects of writing now conjured by that term were represented and related to one another in the mid-nineteenth century. Diverging from much contemporary criticism, he argues that attention to the writing's material components and contexts does not by itself constitute reading against the grain. On the contrary, the Victorian discourse on authorship and the novels Hack discusses--including works by Thackeray, Dickens, Collins, and Eliot--actively investigate the significance and mutual relevance of the written word or printed word's physicality, the exchange of texts for money, the workings of signification, and the corporeality of writers, readers, and characters. Hack shows how these investigations, which involve positioning the novel in relation to such widely denigrated forms of writing as the advertisement and the begging letter, bring into play such basic novelistic properties as sympathetic identification, narrative authority, and fictionality itself. Combining formalist and historicist critical methods in innovative fashion, Hack changes the way we think about the Victorian novel's simultaneous status as text, book, and commodity.