"Key concepts in Victorian Literature provides readers with an insight into the fascinating, but complex, Victorian Age and the literature that defined it. Discussing a variety of novels, poems and plays, the volume both explores Victorian anxieties and preoccupations and also introduces the significant critical and theoretical perspectives that underpin modern research into the age. Structured into three distinct sections, the book establishes the major concepts, themes and issues that characterize the literature of the period, guiding readers through the historical and cultural contexts in which the key works were written."--BOOK JACKET.

Key Concepts in Literary Theory presents the student of literary and critical studies with a broad range of accessible, precise and authoritative definitions of the most significant terms and concepts currently used in psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial literary studies. The volume also provides clear and useful discussions of the main areas of literary, critical and cultural theory, supported by bibliographies and an expanded chronology of major thinkers. Accompanying the chronology are short biographies of major works by each critic or theorist.The third edition of this reliable reference work is both revised and expanded, including:* more than 100 additional terms and concepts defined.* newly defined terms include keywords from the social sciences, cultural studies and psychoanalysis and the addition of a broader selection of classical rhetorical terms.* an expanded chronology, with additional entries and a broader historical and cultural range.* expanded bibliographies including key texts by major critics.

Argues against the repeated emphasis on literary form and for the artistic importance of literary content.

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

This new anthology emphasizes Victorian nonfiction prose and verse with a generous, fresh selection of pieces from authors within the canon as well as outside of it.

A Festschrift honouring J. Hillis Miller and his contribution to Victorian Studies and nineteenth-century criticismProvides stheoretically informed critical essays on nineteenth-century and Victorian literature, by major internationally recognized scholarsChapters provide detailed close readings of the work of J Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy, Walter Pater, William Michael Rossetti, George Gissing, Charles Dickens, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Joseph ConradShowcases a major new essay by J Hillis Miller, as well as a previously unpublished interview with MillerReading Victorian Literature provides a critical commentary on major authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Dickens to Conrad. At the same time, the assembled group of internationally recognised scholars engages with Miller's work, influence and significance in the study of that era. The volume includes original work by Miller and interviews with him.