This study explores the role of fiction in the social production of the West Central district of London in the nineteenth century. It tells a new history of the novel from a local geographical perspective, tracing developments in the form as it engaged with Bloomsbury in the period it emerged as the city’s dominant literary zone. A neighbourhood that was subject simultaneously to socio-economic decline and cultural ascent, fiction set in Bloomsbury is shown to have reconceived the area’s marginality as potential autonomy. Drawing on sociological theory, this book critically historicizes Bloomsbury’s trajectory to show that its association with the intellectual “fraction” known as the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ at the beginning of the twentieth century was symptomatic rather than exceptional. From the 1820s onwards, writers positioned themselves socially within the metropolitan geography they projected through their fiction. As Bloomsbury became increasingly identified with the cultural capital of writers rather than the economic capital of established wealth, writers subtly affiliated themselves with the area, and the figure of the writer and Bloomsbury became symbolically conflated.

While Bloomsbury is now associated with Virginia Woolf and her early-20th-century circle of writers and artists, the neighbourhood was originally the undisputed intellectual quarter of 19th-century London. This title presents a rich history of the great Bloomsbury pioneersthe educational, medical, and social reformists who led crusades for all.

The beginnings of what we now call 'globalization' dates from the early sixteenth century, when Europeans, in particular the Iberian monarchies, began to connect 'the four parts of the world'. From the end of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries, technical advancements, such as the growth of the European rail network and the increasing ease of international shipping, narrowed the physical and imagined distances between different parts of the globe. Books, printed matter and theatrical performances were a crucial part of this process and the so-called 'long nineteenth century' saw a remarkable increase in readership and technological improvements that significantly changed the production of printed matter and its relationship with culture. This book analyzes this sea-change in knowledge and sharing of ideas through the prism of the transatlantic diffusion of French, Brazilian, Portuguese and English print-cultures. In particular, it charts the circulation of printed matter, publishers, booksellers and actors between Europe and South America. Featuring a new original essay from Roger Chartier, The Cultural Revolution of the 19th Century is an essential new benchmark in global and transnational history.

Virginia Woolf, throughout her career as a novelist and critic, deliberately framed herself as a modern writer invested in literary tradition but not bound to its conventions; engaged with politics but not a propagandist; a woman of letters but not a "lady novelist." As a result, Woolf ignored or disparaged most of the women writers of her parents' generation, leading feminist critics to position her primarily as a forward-thinking modernist who rejected a stultifying Victorian past. In Behind the Times, Mary Jean Corbett finds that Woolf did not dismiss this history as much as she boldly rewrote it. Exploring the connections between Woolf's immediate and extended family and the broader contexts of late-Victorian literary and political culture, Corbett emphasizes the ongoing significance of the previous generation's concerns and controversies to Woolf's considerable achievements. Behind the Times rereads and revises Woolf's creative works, politics, and criticism in relation to women writers including the New Woman novelist Sarah Grand, the novelist and playwright, Lucy Clifford; the novelist and anti-suffragist, Mary Augusta Ward. It explores Woolf's attitudes to late-Victorian women's philanthropy, the social purity movement, and women's suffrage. Closely tracking the ways in which Woolf both followed and departed from these predecessors, Corbett complicates Woolf's identity as a modernist, her navigation of the literary marketplace, her ambivalence about literary professionalism and the mixing of art and politics, and the emergence of feminism as a persistent concern of her work.

A portrait of five Concord, Massachusetts, writers whose works were at the center of mid-nineteenth-century American thought and literature evaluates their interconnected relationships, influence on each other's works, and complex beliefs.

Explores radical designs for the home in the nineteenth-century metropolis and the texts that shaped themUncovers a series of innovative housing designs that emerged in response to London's rapid growth and expansion throughout the nineteenth century Brings together the writing of prominent authors such as Charles Dickens and George Gissing with understudied novels and essays to examine the lively literary engagement with new models of urban housing Focuses on the ways that these new homes provided material and creative space for thinking through the relationship between home and identity Identifies ways in which we might learn from the creative responses to the nineteenth-century housing crisis This book brings together a range of new models for modern living that emerged in response to social and economic changes in nineteenth-century London, and the literature that gave expression to their novelty. It examines visual and literary representations to explain how these innovations in housing forged opportunities for refashioning definitions of home and identity. Robertson offers readers a new blueprint for understanding the ways in which novels imaginatively and materially produce the city's built environment.