An ambitious weave of ideological, literary, and commodity history, The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction shows how Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot sacralized Victorian modernity in two contradictory ways: by incarnating their moment as one of transcendent development, and by reenacting bloody rituals from a fading Protestant past. Both the magnitude and the brevity of their success make these works exemplary for our own era, caught between the archaic gods of traditional religion and the still-mysterious ones of market society.

Paying attention to the historically specific dimensions of objects such as the photograph, the illustrated magazine and the collection, the contributors to this volume offer new ways of thinking about nineteenth-century practices of reading, viewing, and collecting, revealing new readings of Wordsworth, Shelley, James and Wilde, among others.

From 1830 to 1870 advertising brought in its wake a new understanding of how the subject read and how language operated. Sara Thornton presents a crucial moment in print culture, the early recognition of what we now call a 'virtual' world, and proposes new readings of key texts by Dickens and Balzac.

This book provides fresh perspectives on the object world, embodied experience and materiality in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Contributors explore canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens and James, alongside less-familiar texts and a range of objects including nineteenth-century automata, scrapbooks, museum exhibits and antiques.

This innovative book draws together literature, law and economic and social history to investigate the meanings and uses of legitimacy in nineteenth-century Britain. This broad range of essays highlights the ways in which contested narratives and interested performances shaped the idea of legitimate authority during this period.

This volume examines the emergence of modern popular culture between the 1830s and the 1860s, when popular storytelling meant serial storytelling and when new printing techniques and an expanding infrastructure brought serial entertainment to the masses. Analyzing fiction and non-fiction narratives from the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Brazil, Popular Culture—Serial Culture offers a transnational perspective on border-crossing serial genres from the roman feuilleton and the city mystery novel to abolitionist gift books and world’s fairs.

Socialism in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain was a highly literate movement. Every socialist group produced some form of written text through which their particular brand of politics could be promoted. This edition collects serialized fiction and short stories that have not been published since their original appearance.