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"--

"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"--

"Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition provides an omnibus account of American literature and its ever-evolving field of study. Emphasizing the ways in which American literature has been in transition ever since its founding, this revisionary series examines four phases of American literary history, focusing on the movements, forms, and media that developed from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The mutable nature of American literature is explored throughout these volumes, which consider a diverse and dynamic set of authors, texts, and methods. Encompassing the full range of today's literary scholarship, this series is an essential guide to the study of nineteenth-century American literature and culture"--

Offering an in-depth overview and reappraisal of the 1860s in British literature, this innovative volume features in-depth analyses from noted scholars at the tops of their fields. Covering characteristic literary genres of the 1860s (including sensation and lyric, as well as Golden Age children's literature), and topics of current and enduring interest in the field, from empire and slavery to evolution, environmental issues and economics, it incorporates drama as well as poetry and fiction, and emphasizes the history of publishing and periodicals so important to the period. Chapters are attentive to the global context, from Ireland on the stage, to Bengali literature, to Britain's muted response to the US Civil War. The Introduction gives an overview that places these individual chapters in the historical context of the 1860s, as well as the current scholarly conversation in the field.