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.

Explores the diverse forces that shaped developments in literature in the 1880s, an often overlooked literary decade.

"As useful and informative to scholars and advanced students in the field as to relative newcomers, this collection demonstrates how the 1890s continue to be an area of perennial interest and relevance even while our understanding of the period changes with our own era's shifting cultural and political concerns"--

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.

"Examining the literature of a profoundly influential decade by some of the century's major writers, this volume brings new primary material to light whilst also re-reading it through today's critical and political preoccupations and approaches, including with race, gender, and the environment"--