Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s

Penny Fielding is Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain 1760–1830 (Cambridge, 2008) and many books and articles on the long nineteenth century as well as a General Editor of the New Edinburgh Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson. Andrew Taylor is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Henry James and the Father Question (Cambridge, 2002) as well as other publications on nineteenth-century transatlantic literary culture.

• Introduction. 'Knowledge made for cutting' Penny Fielding and Andrew Taylor; 1. Mermaids amongst the cables: the abstracted body and the telegraphic touch in the nineteenth century Clare Pettitt; 2. Enclosing forms, opening spaces: the 1880s fixed-verse revival Linda K. Hughes; 3. 'The Newest Culte': Victorian poetry and the literary societies of the 1880s Angela Dunstan; 4. The time of W. E. Henley: 'minor poetry' and the 1880s Penny Fielding; 5. The evolution of point of view Cannon Schmitt; 6. Network, history, method: Andrew Lang in and after the 1880s Nathan K. Hensley; 7. Animated conversations: form, transformation, and the category of the novel in the 1880s Barbara Leckie; 8. Henry James, vulgarity, and the contexts of transatlantic moderation Andrew Taylor; 9. He and She: the 1880s, camp aesthetics and the literary magazine Sara Lodge; 10. Men, women and horses: public spectacle in 1887 John Stokes; 11. The secular turn in British literature of the 1880s William Greenslade; Index.

'… a very welcome addition to the scholarly work on the 1880s. Ambitious in scope, it also manages to cover a satisfyingly broad range of issues related to literature and culture within its 249 pages. Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s is organized elegantly along thematic lines so that each essay leads naturally into its successor, which picks up threads introduced in the previous discussion and develops them in new directions.' Linda Dryden, Victorian Studies