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.

This instalment in the Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition series concerns a decade that was as technologically transitional as it was eventful on a global scale. It collects work from a group of internationally renowned scholars across disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with the wide array of cultural developments that defined the 1830s. Often overlooked as a boundary between the Romantic and Victorian periods, this decade was, the book proposes, the central pivot of the nineteenth century. Far from a time of peaceful reform, it was marked by violent colonial expansion, political resistance, and revolutionary technologies such as the photograph, the expansion of steam power, and the railway that changed the world irreversibly. Contributors explore a flurry of cultural forms to take the pulse of the decade, from Silver Fork fiction to lithography, from working-class periodicals to photographs, and from urban sketches to magazine fiction.

This book explores the ordinary turns of phrase by which major nineteenth-century British writers created character.

The years between 1780 and 1830 are vital decades in the history of Irish writing in English. This book charts the confluence of Enlightenment, antiquarian, and romantic energies within Irish literary culture and shows how different writers and genres absorbed, dispersed and remade those interests during five decades of political change. During those same years, literature made its own history. By the 1840s, Irish writing formed a recognizable body of work, which later generations would draw on, quote, anthologize and dispute. Questions raised by novels, poems and plays of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - the politics of language and voice; the relationship between literature and locality; the possibility of literature as a profession - resonated for many Irish writers over the centuries that followed and continue to matter today. This comprehensive volume will be a key reference for scholars and students of Irish literature and romantic literary studies.

Nineteenth-century American literature is often divided into two asymmetrical halves, neatly separated by the Civil War. Focusing on the later writings of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, this book shows how the war took shape across the nineteenth century, inflecting literary forms for decades after 1865.

Ireland's experience in the nineteenth century was quite different from that of Victorian Britain. Its fictions were written in differing forms - like the gothic or historical novel - and its poetry and drama were populated with ballad and song. Its writers were by turns nationalist or unionist, anglophile or de-anglicising. If the effects of Famine and emigration were catastrophic for mid-nineteenth-century Irish culture, they initiated a literary story that spread across the diaspora. Despite the decline of spoken Irish, literature continued to be published, while scholarly endeavours such as translation or the Ordnance Survey preserved much from the Gaelic past. This rich volume examines the many forms of new writing that thrived throughout this period. Utilizing a thematic and historical approach, it addresses a broad anglophone readership in Victorian literature. Essays consider the Irish authors in America and India, women's writing, and the resilience of Irish literature before the revival.