Victorian Literature

David Amigoni is Professor of Victorian Literature at Keele University. He is the author of The English Novel and Prose Narrative (Edinburgh University Press, 2000) and Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). He is co-editor, with Jeff Wallace, of Charles Darwin's 'Origin of Species': New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester UP, 1995), and co-editor, with Paul Barlow and Colin Trodd, of Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (Ashgate, 1999).

• Chronology; Introduction to Victorian literature: Perspectives, Relationships, Contexts;Generic Traffic in Strangely Modern Places: Locating the Victorians (again); Observing 'Public Culture' in mid-Victorian Britain: an Ant colony, Ivy and Two Poets named 'Alfred';'Civilization and its Discontents': Productivity, Power and Governance in Dickens's Hard Times; Concluding Summary; 1: Novel Sensations in Early and Mid-Victorian Fiction: from 'Boz' to Middlemarch; Dickens the Novelist, Dickens the Journalist: Modes of Publication, Sketches, and the Making of The Old Curiosity Shop; Moving Sensations: Performing The Old Curiosity Shop; The Novel at mid-Century: Forming a Victorian Canon; Variable Sensations of the Real: Middlemarch; Concluding Summary; 2: Theatrical Exchanges: Gendered Subjectivity and Identity Trials in the Dramatic Imagination; Locating, Regulating and Expanding the Effects of 'Theatricality' in Victorian Culture; Melodrama and Public History: the Sexualized Conflicts of Empire in Boucicault's Jessie Brown;Masculinity, Melodrama and Mind: The Frozen Deep; Earnest Laughter, Queer Laughter: Fictive, Multiple identities in Farcical Dramas by Dickens and Wilde; Concluding Summary 3: Poetry: Dramatic Monologues and Critical Dialogues; Voicing Sensation in Tennyson and Browning: the Dramatic Monologue and Cultural Debate; Controversies of Faith: Doubt, Evolution and Love in a Modern Age; Making Women's Voices: Fairy Tales, Christian Tales, Old Wives' Tales; Concluding Summary 4: Victorians in Critical Time: Fin de Siècle and Sage-culture; Victorians at the end of Time: Thomas Hardy, New Women and Gothic; Horrors at the fin de siècle; Victorian Sages in Critical Time: Carlyle and Arnold; Concluding Summary; Conclusion: Neo-Victorianism, Postmodernism and Underground Cultures; Student Resources; Electronic sources and reference sources; Glossary; Guide to further reading; Index.

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