The essays in this collection focus on the ways rural life was represented during the long nineteenth century. Contributors bring expertise from the fields of history, geography and literature to present an interdisciplinary study of the interplay between rural space and gender during a time of increasing industrialization and social change.

Mobility in the Victorian Novel explores mobility in Victorian novels by authors including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. With focus on representations of bodies on the move, it reveals how journeys create the place of the nation within a changing global landscape.

Organized thematically around the themes of time, space, and place, this collection examines Charlotte Brontë in relationship to her own historical context and to her later critical reception, takes up the literal and metaphorical spaces of her literary output, and sheds light on place as both a psychic and geographical phenomenon in her novels and their adaptations. Foregrounding both a historical and a broad cultural approach, the contributors also follow the evolution of Brontë's literary reputation in essays that place her work in conversation with authors such as Samuel Richardson, Walter Scott, and George Sand and offer insights into the cultural and critical contexts that influenced her status as a canonical writer. Taken together, the essays in this volume reflect the resurgence of popular and scholarly interest in Charlotte Brontë and the robust expansion of Brontë studies that is currently under way.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

Transport in British Fiction is the first essay collection devoted to transport and its various types horse, train, tram, cab, omnibus, bicycle, ship, car, air and space as represented in British fiction across a century of unprecedented technological change that was as destabilizing as it was progressive.

The modern-day suburb began, and began booming, in 19th-century Britain. As suburbia spread, the New Woman arose and fin-de-siecle concerns grew, suburban men felt more besieged. Anxieties about hygiene, pollution, purity, the home, class, gender roles, patrilineal power and the state of the Empire rippled through British fiction. The new man of the house was trying, often desperately, to hold onto the old order, changing even more rapidly as the 20th century and modernist fiction arrived. This study traces suburban masculinities in popular genres--speculative fiction, comic fiction and detective fiction--and in literary works from the late-Victorian era to the start of the First World War.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of figures -- Introduction -- PART I: Devouring didacticism: Feeding young minds -- 1 Sweet poison: Food adulteration, fiction and the young glutton -- 2 Onions and honey, roast spiders and chutney: Unusual appetites and disorderly consumption in Edward Lear's nonsense verse -- PART II: An appetite for change: Hunger and nineteenth-century society -- 3 The rhetoric of taste: Reform, hunger and consumption in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton -- 4 Feeding the vampire: the ravenous hunger of the fin de siècle -- PART III: The power of the printed word: Advertising and markets -- 5 'A change comes over the spirit of your vision': Champagne in Britain, 1860-1914 -- 6 The language of advertising: Fashioning health food consumers at the fin de siècle -- PART IV: Into the twentieth century: Legacies and memories -- 7 'Yes, we had no bananas': Sharing memories of the Second World War -- 8 Meeting Mrs Beeton: the personal is political in the recipe book -- Conclusion: 'All else is vain, but eating is real': Gustatory bodies -- List of contributors -- Index