Victorian Identities

The Victorian period was one of enormous cultural diversity with places for figures as different as Alfred Tennyson and Oscar Wilde. Victorian Identities simultaneously celebrates that diversity whilst drawing out the connections between disparate voices. With essays on the 'Greats' of the period - Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Wilde - as well as on the less well-known sensation writer, Rhoda Broughton, and on the formation of children's voices in Victorian literature - the collection rejects narrow definitions of the period and its values, and exposes its texts to readings informed by contemporary literary theory.

Autorentext

Author Julian Wolfreys: Julian Wolfreys is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at Loughborough University, UK. He was previously Professor in Literature at the University of Florida, USA. His teaching and research is concerned with 19th- and 20th-century British literary and cultural studies, literary theory, the poetics and politics of identity, and the idea of the city. He is the series editor of Transitions and has written many course texts for Literature students, notably The English Literature Companion.

Inhalt
Notes on the Contributors - Foreword; J.R.Kincaid - Introduction: A Moment Recalled; R.Robbins & J.Wolfreys - PART 1: EN-GENDERING DEBATES: MASCULINITY, FEMININITY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY - Rhoda Broughton's Not Wisely But Too Well and the Art of Sensation; H.Debenham - Labors of a Modern Storyteller: George Eliot and the Cultural Project of 'Nationhood'; C.Lesjak - An Anatomy of the British Polity: Alton Locke and Christian Manliness; D.Alderson - PART 2: AGAINST THE GRAIN - Ante-Anti-Semitism: George Eliot's Impressions of Theophrastus Such; N.Henry - Tennyson and the Poetic Forms of Resistance; C.M.Berardini - 'And Judas Always Writes the Biography': The Many Lives of Oscar Wilde; R.Robbins - PART 3: CULTURAL FORMATIONS AND MODES OF PRODUCTION - Representing Illegitimacy in Victorian Culture; J.B.Taylor - Models of the Adult World and the Language of Control in Victorian Children's Literature; R.Melrose & D.Gardner - Watch This Space: Wilkie Collins and New Strategies of Victorian Publishing in the 1890s; A.Weedon - PART 4: QUEST(ION)S FOR IDENTITIES - Telling the Whole Truth: Wilkie Collins and the Lady Detective; J.Maynard - Dickensian Architextures or, the City and the Ineffable; J.Wolfreys - Inventing Social Identity: Sketches by Boz; Geoffrey Hemstedt - Afterword: Diversity in Victorian Studies and the Opportunities of Theory; W.Baker - Bibliography - Index