Can sexual restraint be good for you? Many Victorians thought so. This book explores the surprisingly positive construction of sexual restraint in an unlikely place: late nineteenth-century Decadence. Reading Decadent texts alongside Victorian writing about sexual health, including medical literature, adverts, advice books, and periodical articles, it identifies an intellectual Paterian tradition of sensuous continence, in which 'healthy' pleasure is distinguished from its 'harmful' counterpart. Recent work on Decadent sexuality concentrates on transgression and subversion, with restraint interpreted ahistorically as evidence of repression/sublimation or queer coding. Here Sarah Green examines the work of Walter Pater, Lionel Johnson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore to outline a co-extensive alternative approach to sexuality where restraint figured as a productive part of the 'aesthetic life', or a practical ethics shaped by aesthetic principles. Attending to this tradition reveals neglected connections within and beyond Decadence, bringing fresh perspective to its late nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception.

Centring on Darwin and on literature throughout the nineteenth century, this book documents a general crisis in the species concept.

At the turn of the twentieth century, novelists faced an unprecedented crisis of scale. While exponential increases in industrial production, resource extraction, and technological complexity accelerated daily life, growing concerns about deep time, evolution, globalization, and extinction destabilised scale's value as a measure of reality. Here, Aaron Rosenberg examines how four novelists moved radically beyond novelistic realism, repurposing the genres-romance, melodrama, gothic, and epic-it had ostensibly superseded. He demonstrates how H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf engaged with climatic and ecological crises that persist today, requiring us to navigate multiple temporal and spatial scales simultaneously. The volume shows that problems of scale constrain our responses to crisis by shaping the linguistic, aesthetic, and narrative structures through which we imagine it. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

The first collected study of Pater's significance to criticism, revealing his pivotal role in establishing principles of the literary essay.

Lauren Gillingham reveals how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel in nineteenth-century Britain.

One essay, for example, traces the remarkable feminist appropriation of male-identified fields of study, such as Classical philology. Others address the validation of male bodies as objects of desire in writing, painting, and emergent modernist choreography. The writings shed light on the diverse interests served by a range of cultural practitioners and on the complex ways in which the late Victorians invented themselves as modern subjects."--Pub. desc.

Based on close readings of five Victorian novels, Hallum presents an original study of the interaction between popular fiction, the marriage market and the aesthetic movement. She uses the texts to trace the development of aestheticism, examining the differences between the authors, including their approach, style and gender.