Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s

Description

What does it mean to focus on the decade as a unit of literary history? Emerging from the shadows of iconic Victorian authors such as Eliot and Tennyson, the 1880s is a decade that has been too readily overlooked in the rush to embrace end-of-century decadence and aestheticism. The 1880s witnessed new developments in transatlantic networks, experiments in lyric poetry, the decline of the three-volume novel, and the revaluation of authors, journalists and the reading public. The contributors to this collection explore the case for the 1880s as both a discrete point of literary production, with its own pressures and provocations, and as part of literature's sense of its expanded temporal and geographical reach. The essays address a wide variety of authors, topics and genres, offering incisive readings of the diverse forces at work in the shaping of the literary 1880s.

Penny Fielding is Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain 1760-1830 (Cambridge, 2008) and many books and articles on the long nineteenth century as well as a General Editor of the New Edinburgh Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson. Andrew Taylor is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Henry James and the Father Question (Cambridge, 2002) as well as other publications on nineteenth-century transatlantic literary culture.