By the end of the nineteenth century the novel unquestionably had become the most popular and influential of English literary forms. Yet it has not always been clear how the Victorians themselves regarded the nature of prose fiction. This volume is a collection of twelve 'landmark' essays that chart the development of English theories of fiction during the great age of the novel. Spanning the whole of the Victorian period, from Bulwer Lytton's 'On Art in Fiction' (1838) to Conrad's preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), the volume also includes pieces by George Eliot, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and a number of the more important critics and reviewers of the time. The editors' introduction surveys the main issues, such as the debate between realism and romance, addressed by novel criticism throughout the period. Each of the selections that follow is set in its historical context by a prefatory essay and is fully annotated for the student. There is a helpful bibliography of further reading.

Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates offers a comprehensive introduction to the critical debates about Victorian Literature, addressing the most popular and engaging topics in the field today.

In this sophisticated application of modern Marxist thought, N. N. Feltes demonstrates the determining influence of nineteenth-century publishing practices on the Victorian novel. His dialectical analysis leads to a comprehensive explanation of the development of capitalist novel production into the twentieth century. Feltes focuses on five English novels: Dickens's Pickwick Papers, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Eliot's Middlemarch, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Forster's Howards End. Published at approximately twenty year intervals between 1836 and 1920, they each represent a different first-publication format: part-issue, three-volume, bimonthly, magazine-serial, and single-volume. Drawing on publishing, economic, and literary history, Feltes offers a broad, synthetic explanation of the relationship between the production and format of each novel, and the way in which these determine, in the last instance, the ideology of the text. Modes of Production in Victorian Novels provides a Marxist structuralist analysis of historical events and practices described elsewhere only empirically, and traces their relationship to literary texts which have been analyzed only idealistically, thus setting these familiar works firmly and perhaps permanently into a framework of historic materialism.

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.

The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel traces the the story of victimized childhood to its origins in nineteenth-century Britain. Almost as soon as "childhood" became a distinct category, Laura C. Berry contends, stories of children in danger were circulated as part of larger debates about child welfare and the role of the family in society. Berry examines the nineteenth-century fascination with victimized children to show how novels and reform writings reorganize ideas of self and society as narratives of childhood distress. Focusing on classic childhood stories such as Oliver Twist and novels that are not conventionally associated with particular social problems, such as Dickens's Dombey and Son, the Brontë sisters' Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot's Adam Bede, Berry shows the ways in which fiction that purports to deal with private life, particularly the domain of the family, nevertheless intervenes in public and social debates. At the same time she examines medical, legal, charitable, and social-relief writings to show how these documents provide crucial sources in the development of social welfare and modern representations of the family.

Taking as his point of departure the competing uses of the critical term the materiality of writing, Daniel Hack turns to the past in this provocative new book to recover the ways in which the multiple aspects of writing now conjured by that term were represented and related to one another in the mid-nineteenth century. Diverging from much contemporary criticism, he argues that attention to the writing's material components and contexts does not by itself constitute reading against the grain. On the contrary, the Victorian discourse on authorship and the novels Hack discusses--including works by Thackeray, Dickens, Collins, and Eliot--actively investigate the significance and mutual relevance of the written word or printed word's physicality, the exchange of texts for money, the workings of signification, and the corporeality of writers, readers, and characters. Hack shows how these investigations, which involve positioning the novel in relation to such widely denigrated forms of writing as the advertisement and the begging letter, bring into play such basic novelistic properties as sympathetic identification, narrative authority, and fictionality itself. Combining formalist and historicist critical methods in innovative fashion, Hack changes the way we think about the Victorian novel's simultaneous status as text, book, and commodity.

A collection of essays which describes the reading audience, publication methods, and literary style of the Victorian novel and provides a critical analysis of the period's major fiction writers.