Victorian Fiction Beyond the Canon

Trish Ferguson is Senior Lecturer in the English Department of Liverpool Hope University, UK. She is the author of Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions (2013) and the editor of Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).Daragh Downes is a Teaching Fellow in English and German at Trinity College Dublin. His chief English research interest is Charles Dickens and his milieu.

• Introduction: Exploring the Hinterland of Victorian Fiction; Daragh Downes and Trish Ferguson.- Chapter 2. Prize Novelists and Condensed Novels: Thackeray and Bret Harte; Michael Slater.- Chapter 3. Before New Grub Street: Thomas Miller and the Contingencies of Authorship; Adam Abraham.- Chapter 4. Emboldening the Weak: the Early Fiction of James Anthony Froude; Ciaran Brady.- Chapter 5. George Borrow: The Scholar, The Gipsy, The Priest; Monika Mazurek.- Chapter 6. Sensation Fiction as Social Activism: Charles Reade’s It Is Never Too Late to Mend and Felicia Skene’s Hidden Depths; Elizabeth Andrews.- Chapter 7. Sheer Luck, Holmes? Clues towards Canon Formation in Victorian Detective Fiction; Daragh Downes.- Chapter 8.Politics of the Strange and Unusual: Mesmerism and the Medical Professional in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘Dr Carrick’ (1878); Samantha J. M. Aliu.-Chapter 9. Silas K. Hocking, Her Benny, and the Poetics of the Prolific; Christopher Pittard.- Chapter 10. Henry Hawley Smart's The Great Tontine and the Art of Book-making; Trish Ferguson.- Chapter 11. Performative Politics and Gendered Geography in Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction; Ailise Bulfin.- Chapter 13. Dat Cura Commodum or A Portrait of a Deviant Mind: Arthur Griffiths’s The Rome Express, John Milne’s ‘The Express Series’ and Late Victorian Detective Fiction; Paul Raphael Rooney.- Bibliography.-

“The essays in Victorian Fiction Beyond the Canon are consistently absorbing and, collectively, they make a strong and urgent case for the need to study the work of the other 99.5 percent.” (Grace Moore, Victorian Studies, Vol. 62 (1), 2019)