York Notes Companions: Victorian Literature

Dr Beth Palmer is lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey (from September 2010). Her teaching interests are wide-ranging and she has taught British and American literature from the 18th to 21st centuries with particular interests in Victorian fiction, women's writing, and the Bronte sisters. Her research interests have centred around Victorian fiction, print culture and the press, readership and women's writing. Forthcoming publications are Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies (Oxford University Press, 2011) and A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850-1900, eds Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland (Ashgate, 2011). She is currently developing a new research project on the relationship between the popular theatre and the Victorian novel and is also interested in neo-Victorian fiction.

• Part One – Introduction                                                                                                                                                             Part Two – A Cultural Overview                               Part Three – Texts, Writers and Contexts Victorian Poetry – Memory and Mourning: The Brownings, Swinburne and Alfred, Lord TennysonExtended commentary: Tennyson, In Memoriam The Social Problem Novel: Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley and Elizabeth GaskellExtended Commentary: Gaskell, North and South (1855) The Provincial or Regional Novel: Anthony Trollope, George Eliot and Thomas HardyExtended Commentary: Hardy, Far From the Madding CrowdSensation Fiction: Wilkie Collins, Ellen Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon Extended Commentary: Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)Victorian Drama: Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard ShawExtended Commentary: Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893)Aesthetes and Decadents: Walter Pater, Arthur Symonds, J. K. Huysmans and Oscar WildeExtended Commentary: Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Part Four: Critical theories and DebatesReader Reception and the popular author New women, New Readers The Literature of Empire and National IdentityScience, Eugenics and EvolutionPart Five – References and resourcesTimelineFurther readingIndex

"The book was well written and flowed neatly, linking ideas and works by different authors, and as ever quotations help to outline different points... The book was very useful, particularly its extended commentary on Dorian Gray"- Kimberley Simpson, English Student Warwick University