Focusing on works by George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, Alice Crossley examines the emergence of adolescence in the mid-Victorian period as a distinct form of experience. Adolescence, Crossley shows, appears as a discrete category of identity that draws on but is nonetheless distinguishable from other masculine types. Important more as a stage of psychological awareness and maturation than as a period of biological youth, Crossley argues that the plasticity of male adolescence provides Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope with opportunities for self-reflection and social criticism while also working as a paradigm for narrative and imaginative inquiry about motivation, egotism, emotional and physical relationships, and the possibilities of self-creation. Adolescence emerges as a crucial stage of individual growth, adopted by these authors in order to reflect more fully on cultural and personal anxieties about manliness. The centrality of male youth in these authors’ novels, Crossley demonstrates, repositions age-consciousness as an integral part of nineteenth-century debates about masculine heterogeneity.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British society gradually began to see 'adolescence' as a distinct social entity worthy of concentrated study and debate. Jenny Holt argues that the social construction of the public schoolboy, a figure made ubiquitous by a huge body of fictional, biographical, and journalistic work, had a disproportionate role to play in the development of social perceptions of adolescence and in forming ideas of how young people should be educated to become citizens in an age of increasing democracy. With attention to an admirably wide range of popular books as well as examples from the periodical press, Jenny Holt begins with a discussion of the ideas of late-eighteenth-century social radicals, and ends with the First World War, when the more 'serious' public school literature, which sought to involve juvenile readers in complex social and political issues, declined suddenly in popularity. Along the way, Jenny Holt considers the influence of Victorian Evangelical thought, Social Darwinism, and the early-twentieth-century National Efficiency movement on concepts of adolescence. Whether it is shedding new light on well-known texts by Thomas Hughes and Rudyard Kipling, providing a fascinating discussion of works written by boys themselves, or supplying historical context for the development of the concept of adolescence, this book will engage not only scholars of childhood and children's literature but Victorianists and those interested in the history of educational practice.

Patriarchy’s Creative Resilience explores the disturbing sustainability of White male supremacy. Kramp traces an imaginative failure and an imaginative success; his focus on British speculative fiction published between 1870 and 1900 demonstrates how even this elastic and wildly inventive literary form remains incapable of promoting non- patriarchal masculinity, and he attributes this inability to the creative resiliency of white male supremacy. He demonstrates the inventive use of diverse resources that we frequently view as custom or uncomplicated history and a versatility that we often dismiss as sheer power. He draws on an archive of late nineteenth- century speculative fiction to detail a versatile patriarchal toolbox, including hegemonic masculinity, control of dangerous women, hyperbolic and sentimental performances of male sovereignty, and reversions to authoritarian, at times violent conduct. He also considers how the classic military strategy of dividing to conquer undergirds all these tactics, inhibiting our creating energies and dynamic collaborations. Various chapters demonstrate the enterprise, ingenuity, and adaptability of patriarchy to refashion and rejustify normalized systems of oppression. While scholars have consistently identified moments and agents of resistance to patriarchal structures by highlighting creativity, resiliency, and resourcefulness, Kramp’s project reveals how patriarchy itself is creative, resilient, and resourceful.

The influences of William Wordsworth’s writing and evolutionary theory—the nineteenth century’s two defining visions of nature—conflicted in the Victorian period. For Victorians, Wordsworthian nature was a caring source of inspiration and moral guidance, signaling humanity's divine origins and potential. Darwin’s nature, by contrast, appeared as an indifferent and amoral reminder of an evolutionary past that demanded participation in a brutal struggle for existence. Victorian authors like Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy grappled with these competing representations in their work. They turned to Wordsworth as an alternative or antidote to evolution, criticized and altered his poetry in response to Darwinism, and synthesized elements of each to propose their own modified theories. Darwin’s account of a material, evolutionary nature both threatened the Wordsworthian belief in nature’s transcendent value and made spiritual elevation seem more urgently necessary. Victorian authors used Wordsworth and Darwin to explore what form of transcendence, if any, could survive an evolutionary age, and reevaluated the purpose of literature in the process.

The Victorian era is famous for the collecting, hording, and displaying of things; for the mass production and consumption of things; for the invention, distribution and sale of things; for those who had things, and those who did not. For many people, the Victorian period is intrinsically associated with paraphernalia. This collection of essays explores the Victorians through their materiality, and asks how objects were part of being Victorian; which objects defined them, represented them, were uniquely theirs; and how reading the Victorians, through their possessions, can deepen our understanding of Victorian culture. Miscellaneous and often auxiliary, paraphernalia becomes the ‘disjecta’ of everyday life, deemed neither valuable enough for museums nor symbolic enough for purely literary study. This interdisciplinary collection looks at the historical, cultural and literary debris that makes up the background of Victorian life: Valentine’s cards, fish tanks, sugar plums, china ornaments, hair ribbons, dresses and more. Contributors also, however, consider how we use Victorian objects to construct the Victorian today; museum spaces, the relation of Victorian text to object, and our reading – or gazing at – Victorian advertisements out of context on searchable online databases. Responding to thing theory and modern scholarship on Victorian material culture, this book addresses five key concerns of Victorian materiality: collecting; defining class in the home; objects becoming things; objects to texts; objects in circulation through print culture.

Current studies in disciplinarity range widely across philosophical and literary contexts, producing heated debate and entrenched divergences. Yet, despite their manifest significance for us today seldom have those studies engaged with the Victorian origins of modern disciplinarity. Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines adds a crucial missing link in that history by asking and answering a series of deceptively simple questions: how did Victorians define a discipline; what factors impinged upon that definition; and how did they respond to disciplinary understanding? Structured around sections on professionalization, university curriculums, society journals, literary genres and interdisciplinarity, Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines addresses the tangled bank of disciplinarity in the arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences including musicology, dance, literature, and art history; classics, history, archaeology, and theology; anthropology, psychology; and biology, mathematics and physics. Chapters examine the generative forces driving disciplinary formation, and gauge its success or failure against social, cultural, political, and economic environmental pressures. No other volume has focused specifically on the origin of Victorian disciplines in order to track the birth, death, and growth of the units into which knowledge was divided in this period, and no other volume has placed such a wide array of Victorian disciplines in their cultural context.

Barrow’s timely book is the first to examine the link between Victorian poetry, the study of language, and political reform. Focusing on a range of literary, scientific, and political texts, Barrow demonstrates that nineteenth-century debates about language played a key role in shaping emergent ideas about popular sovereignty. While Victorian scientists studied the origins of speech, the history of dialects, and the barrier between human and animal language, poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Thomas Hardy drew on this research to explore social unrest, the expansion of the electorate, and the ever-widening boundaries of empire. Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry recovers unacknowledged links between poetry, philology, and political culture, and contributes to recent movements in literary studies that combine historicist and formalist approaches.