Sibylle Baumbach is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Her research areas include early modern literature and cognitive literary studies, especially literary attention. She is the author of Literature and Fascination (2015) and Shakespeare and the Art of Physiognomy (2008). Ulla Ratheiser is Senior Scientist for English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She has a background in postcolonial studies, while her more recent research focuses on popular culture and the representation of monarchies.

• Preface (Pamela K. Gilbert).- 1 How to Do Things with Surfaces: The Politics and Poetics of Victorian surfaces (Sibylle Baumbach and Ulla Ratheiser).- 2 The Semantics of Surfaces: Victorian Panoramas and the Panoramic Gaze (Heidi Liedke).- 3 Twinship and Tactile Anxieties in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872) (Wieland Schwanebeck).- 4 Touching Skins, Spreading Stains: Contesting, Affirming and Penetrating Surfaces in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Felicitas Meifert-Meinhard).- 5 Dickens’ Dirty Children (Franziska Quabeck).- 6 Gothic Cloth: Textures of the Unknown (Sophia Jochem and Cordula Lemke).- 7 Imperial Hauntings in the Durbar Room: Spurious Materiality in Neo-Victorian Biopics (Jan Rupp).- 8 “Red-hot applications on their vile skins.” Ironic Transparency in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (Eike Kronshage).- 9 Making Skin Legible: Surface and Symptomatic Readings of Victorian Culture (Monika Pietzrak-Franger).- 10 Afterword (Kate Flint).