The Victorian Novel in Context

Description

This book introduces students to the Victorian novel and its contexts, teaching strategies for reading and researching nineteenth-century literature. Combining close reading with background information and analysis it considers the Victorian novel as a product of the industrial age by focusing on popular texts including Dickens's Oliver Twist, Gaskell's North and South and Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. The Victorian Novel in Context examines the changing readership resulting from the growth of mass literacy and the effect that this had on the form of the novel. Taking texts from the early, mid and late Victorian period it encourages students to consider how serialization shaped the nineteenth-century novel. It highlights the importance of politics, religion and the evolutionary debate in 'classic' Victorian texts. Addressing key concerns including realist writing, literature and imperialism, urbanization and women's writing, it introduces students to a variety of the most important critical approaches to the novels. Introducing texts, contexts and criticism, this is a lively and up-to-date resource for anyone studying the Victorian novel.

Grace Moore teaches in the English and Theatre programme at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Dickens and Empire (Ashgate, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2006 New South Wales Premier's Award for Literary Scholarship,the editor of Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century (Ashgate, 2011), and the co-editor (with Andrew Maunder) of Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation (Ashgate, 2004).

The bibliography is extensive and thorough, and the index is useful. -- William Baker with Erica Sparby * Year's Work in English Studies, vol. 93 *