The 1850s United States witnessed a far-reaching political, social, and economic crisis. Symptomatic of this, a wide range of narrative fiction from sentimental novels to sensational drama identifies a foundational link between liberal institutions and performative utterances. Auctions, trials, marriages, and contracts, this fiction contends, all depend on the self-constituting authority of words and performances which anybody and everybody can appropriate and are always subject to misfiring. Rather than viewing this as a liberatory and egalitarian political force, however, writers from Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper to Captain Mayne Reid and E.D.E.N. Southworth insist that such naked authority must be supplemented. A broad swath of 1850s literature insists that this supplement ought to come from Christianity. Anticipating thinkers like Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, these works suggest that legitimate political authority depends upon its ability to represent Christian transcendence and account for revealed truth, something firmly outside of speech acts’ and performance’s purview. In so doing, this diverse body of fiction registers a desire to reconstitute political authority on transcendent and representable ground, augmenting institutional reliance on mere words and assuaging the contemporary crises of confidence and authority.

Doctrine and Difference: The Thematic Scale of Classic American Literature aims to expand and deepen our knowledge into the inquiry of “contextual historicism,” observing writers of the American nineteenth century, and their vastly differing approaches to perceptions such as race, gender, and national identity. Ranging from the religious acuities of the first American Puritans to the more secularized literary awakening of the American Renaissance and into late-century texts that deliberately resist the limits of received religious and political opinion, this volume seeks to uncover a history of human thought within classic American Literature. This volume critically observes these survivable works of literature, presenting insight into the “difference” made by conversation, dispute, and dramatized self-doubt within novels and poems of the historical past.

James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family is the first monograph focusing on Sweeney Todd and Varney the Vampyre’s creator James Malcolm Rymer (1814–1884). It argues that Rymer wrote his so-called ‘penny bloods’ and ‘dreadfuls’ for and about British urban working families. In the 1840s, the notion of the family acquired unprecedented prominence and radical potential. Raised in an artisanal artistic-literary family, Rymer wrote for and edited family magazines early in that genre’s history, deployed Chartist domesticity to liberal ends, and collaborated with cheap publisher Edward Lloyd to define and popularise the domestic romance genre. In 1850s–1860s penny serials published by George W.M. Reynolds, John Dicks, and Lloyd, Rymer showed how families might sustain Empire and advocated for patriarchal family dynamics in response to literary and political change. During the fin-de-siècle, Rymer’s penny fiction was demonised as hyper-masculine ‘bloods’ and ‘dreadfuls’, a reputation it retains today. Reading Victorian penny fiction’s most indicative author’s works as a corpus and with attention to their original textual, cultural, and political contexts reveals it as the family-oriented phenomenon it in fact was.

English Industrial Fiction of the Mid-Nineteenth Century discusses the valuable fiction written in mid-nineteenth-century Britain which represents the situations of the new breed of industrial workers, both the mostly male factory workers who operated in the oppressive mills of the midlands and north and, in other stories, the oppressed seamstresses who worked mostly in London in very poor and low-paid conditions. Beginning with a general introduction to workers’ fiction at the start of the period, this volume charts the rise of an identifiable genre of industrial fiction and the development of a substantial mode of seamstress fiction through the 1840s, including an analysis of novels by Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, and more briefly Charlotte Bronte, Geraldine Jewsbury and George Eliot. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of industrial fiction and nineteenth-century Britain, or those with an interest in the relationship between literature, society and politics.

The Ambivalent Detective in Victorian Sensation Novels studies how the detective as a literary character evolved through the mid-nineteenth century in England, as seen in sensation novels. In contrast to most assumptions about the English detective, Yoon argues that the detective was more often tolerated than admired following the establishment of professional detectives in the London Metropolitan Police Force in 1842. Through studying the historical and literary contexts between the 1840s to the 1860s, Yoon argues that the detective was seen as a suspicious, even mistrusted and disdained, figure who was nonetheless viewed as necessary to combat rising levels of crime. The detective as a literary character responded to the often contradictory values and aspirations of the middle class, representing an independent masculinity and laying claim to scientific authority. This study surveys novels by Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Wilkie Collins, alongside lesser-known writers like William Russell, James Redding Ware (pseudonym Andrew Forrester), and William Stephens Hayward. This book contributes to the study of mid-nineteenth-century Victorian culture and connects with broader studies of the detective fiction genre.

Tracing the origins of how we think about strangers to the Victorian period, Strangers and the Enchantment of Space in Victorian Fiction, 1830-1865 explores the vital role strangers had in shaping social relations during the cultural transformations of the industrial revolution, transportation technologies, and globalization. While studies of nineteenth-century Britain tend to trace the rise of an aloof cosmopolitanism and distancing narrative strategies, this volume calls attention to the personalizing impulse in nineteenth-century literary form, investigating the deeply personal reflections on individual and national identities. In her book, Dr. Pond leads the reader through homes of the urban poor, wandering the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, loitering in suburban neighborhoods, riding the railway, and touring a country estate. Readers will experience how the ordinary can be enchanting, and how the mundane can be unexpected, discovering a new way of thinking about strangers and their influence on our lives. Through an examination of the short and long fictional forms of Martineau, Dickens, Brontë, Gaskell, and Braddon, this study locates the figure of the stranger as a powerful topos in the story Victorian literature and the ethics of social relations. This book will be ideal for those seeking to understand the dynamics of the stranger in Victorian fiction as a figure for understanding the changing dynamics of social relations in England in the early nineteenth century.

Keats and Scepticism explores Keats’s affinity with the philosophical tradition of scepticism and reads Keats’s poetry anew in the light of this affinity. It suggests Keats’s links with the origin of scepticism in ancient Greece as recorded in Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Scepticism. It also discusses Keats’s connections with Montaigne, the most important Renaissance inheritor of Pyrrhonian scepticism; Voltaire, the Enlightenment philosophe whose sceptical ideas made an indelible impact on Keats; and Hume, the most thoroughgoing sceptic after antiquity. Other than Keats’s affinitive ideas with these sceptical thinkers, this book is particularly interested in Keats’s experiments with the peculiar language, forms, modes, and genres of poetry to convey the non-dogmatic philosophy. In this light, it re-reads Isabella, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, the 1819 odes, the two Hyperions, King Stephen, and Lamia, all of which reveal Keats’s self-reflexive and radical sceptical poetics in challenging poetic dogmas and conventions. This book is for Keats lovers, students, teachers, scholars, or non-academic readers who are interested in Romanticism, nineteenth-century studies, or poetry and philosophy in general. This original, accessible interdisciplinary study aims to offer the reader a fresh perspective to read Keats and appreciate the quintessential Keatsian poetics.