History of Victorian Literature

James Eli Adams teaches in the English Department at Cornell, where he is Director of Graduate Studies. He is the author of Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (1995); the general editor of the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era (2004); and co-editor of Sexualities in Victorian Britain (1996).

• Preface ix Note on Citations xiiiIntroduction: Locating Victorian Literature 1Byron is Dead 1Cultural Contexts 2The Literary Field 11An Age of Prose 14The Situation of Poetry 19Victorian Theater 21The Novel After Scott 221 "The Times are Unexampled": Literature in the Age of Machinery, 1830–1850 27Constructing the Man of Letters 27The Burdens of Poetry 33Theater in the 1830s 48Fiction in the Early 1830s 50Dickens and the Forms of Fiction 55Poetry after the Annuals 66Literature of Travel 70History and Heroism 73Social Crisis and the Novel 81The Domestic Ideal 84From Silver-Fork to Farce 86Poetry in the Early 1840s 89The Literature of Labor 95Medievalism 98"The Two Nations" 101"What's Money After All?" 111Romance and Religion 116The Novel of Development 123Art, Politics, and Faith 127In Memoriam 1372 Crystal Palace and Bleak House: Expansion and Anomie, 1851–1873 143The Novel and Society 145Crimea and the Forms of Heroism 156Empire 164Spasmodics and Other Poets 168The Power of Art 182Realisms 187Two Guineveres 194Sensation 200Dreams of Self-Fashioning 207Narrating Nature: Darwin 215Novels and their Audiences 218Literature for Children 228Poetry in the Early 1860s 232Criticism and Belief 244The Pleasures of the Difficult 250The Hellenic Tradition 259Domesticity, Politics, Empire, and the Novel 267After Dickens 275The Persistence of Epic 282Poisonous Honey and Fleshly Poetry 2863 The Rise of Mass Culture and the Specter of Decline, 1873–1901 293Science, Materialism, and Value 296Twilight of the Poetic Titans 305The Decline of the Marriage Plot 314The Aesthetic Movement 325Aesthetic Poetry 329Life-Writing 333Morality and the Novel 342Romance 351Regionalism 356The Arrival of Kipling 360Fiction and the Forms of Belief 365Sex, Science, and Danger 370Fictions of the Artist 375Decadence 377Drama in the 1880s 381The New Woman in Fiction 386Decadent Form 394The Poetry of London 400Yeats 405The Scandal of Wilde 408Poetry After Wilde 411Fictions of Decline 416Conrad 423Epilogue 429Works Cited 435Index 451

"This is a beautifully written, truly intelligent book that understands the Victorians. Reading this volume was a pleasure that brought home rather forcefully the relatively functional nature of so much professional academic prose." (Victorian Studies, Spring 2010) "This elegant and far-reaching book offers a surprising source of optimism to those working in the humanities in Higher Education." (Dickens Quarterly, 2010)"Throughout his prose is clear and unpretentious--in short, entirely appropriate for his intended audience. Though specialists may quibble over what Adams chooses to omit from this concise account, this book is a remarkable achievement." (CHOICE, October 2009)"...its breadth of coverage is staggering. It includes all the major figures and genres of the age, hosts of relatively minor authors and works, and all the important subgenres. Also, by placing the individual works in their ever-shifting literary and cultural milieus, it provides a depth of insight lacking in more narrowly conceived studies.... Also, it may well stimulate an exploration of the work of such important but neglected authors as Ainsworth, Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton, not to mention such utterly forgotten authors as Catherine Gore. Adams, in fact, seems to have read so much of the relatively minor and currently neglected literature of the entire period, and writes about it with such gusto and infectious enthusiasm that he extends the breadth and depth of the entire field of Victorian studies and will doubtless inspire specialists as well as less advanced students of the period to read works they might otherwise have viewed as expendable. The book is indeed so replete with valuable insights into so many works and authors that the reader who has taken in its chronological sweep by reading from the introduction through the epilogue will undoubtedly return over and over again via the index to review the readings of particular works" (New Books Online, September 2009)