Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its decentralized, voluntarist institutional culture and passionate disdain for state interference. Focusing on a wide range of Victorian writing—from literary figures such as Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Harriet Martineau, J. S. Mill, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells to prominent social reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, Thomas Chalmers, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, and Beatrice Webb—Goodlad shows that Foucault's later essays on liberalism and "governmentality" provide better critical tools for understanding the nineteenth-century British state. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State delves into contemporary debates over sanitary, education, and civil service reform, the Poor Laws, and the century-long attempt to substitute organized charity for state services. Goodlad's readings elucidate the distinctive quandary of Victorian Britain and, indeed, any modern society conceived in liberal terms: the elusive quest for a "pastoral" agency that is rational, all-embracing, and effective but also anti-bureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory. In this study, impressively grounded in literary criticism, social history, and political theory, Goodlad offers a timely post-Foucauldian account of Victorian governance that speaks to the resurgent neoliberalism of our own day.

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.

Incorporating a broad range of contemporary scholarship, A History of Victorian Literature presents an overview of the literature produced in Great Britain between 1830 and 1900, with fresh consideration of both major figures and some of the era's less familiar authors. Part of the Blackwell Histories of Literature series, the book describes the development of the Victorian literary movement and places it within its cultural, social and political context. A wide-ranging narrative overview of literature in Great Britain between 1830 and 1900, capturing the extraordinary variety of literary output produced during this era Analyzes the development of all literary forms during this period - the novel, poetry, drama, autobiography and critical prose - in conjunction with major developments in social and intellectual history Considers the ways in which writers engaged with new forms of social responsibility in their work, as Britain transformed into the world's first industrial economy Offers a fresh perspective on the work of both major figures and some of the era’s less familiar authors Winner of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award, 2009

In a work that is uniquely comprehensive and theoretically astute, Isobel Armstrong rescues Victorian poetry from its longstanding sepia image as `a moralised form of romantic verse', and unearths its often subversive critique of nineteenth-century culture and politics.

A study of alliances between prostitutes and femminists and their clashes with medical authorities and police.

This collection includes twelve provocative essays from a diverse group of international scholars, who utilize a range of interdisciplinary approaches to analyze “real” and “representational” animals that stand out as culturally significant to Victorian literature and culture. Essays focus on a wide range of canonical and non-canonical Victorian writers, including Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Anna Sewell, Emily Bronte, James Thomson, Christina Rossetti, and Richard Marsh, and they focus on a diverse array of forms: fiction, poetry, journalism, and letters. These essays consider a wide range of cultural attitudes and literary treatments of animals in the Victorian Age, including the development of the animal protection movement, the importation of animals from the expanding Empire, the acclimatization of British animals in other countries, and the problems associated with increasing pet ownership. The collection also includes an Introduction co-written by the editors and Suggestions for Further Study, and will prove of interest to scholars and students across the multiple disciplines which comprise Animal Studies.

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.