Victorian Vulgarity

Susan David Bernstein is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Elsie B. Mitchie is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University, USA.

Contents: Introduction: varieties of vulgarity, Elsie B. Mitchie and Susan David Bernstein; Part I Vulgar Words: The vulgarity of elegance: social mobility, middle-class diction, and the Victorian novel, Beth Newman; Wulgarity and witality: on making a spectacle of oneself in Pickwick, James Buzard; Rudeness, slang, and obscenity: working-class politics in London Labour and The London Poor, Ellen Bayuk Rosenman. Part II Common Places: Vulgar Christianity, Elsie B. Michie; Breeding, education, and vulgarity: George Gissing and the lower-middle classes, Rosemary Jann; Too common readers at the British Museum, Susan David Bernstein; 'A religion of pots and pans': Jewish materialism and spiritual materiality in Israel Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto, Meri-Jane Rochelson. Part III Vulgar Middles: Gross vulgarity and the domestic ideal: Anthony Trollope's The Small House at Allington, Carolyn Dever; 'It went through and through me like an electric shock': celebrating vulgar female desire and the realist novel in Trollope's Ayala's Angel, Deborah Denenholz Morse; Vulgarity, stupidity, and worldliness in Middlemarch, Joseph Litvak. Part IV Visual Vulgarity: Poison books and moving pictures: vulgarity in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ronald R. Thomas; James Tissot's 'coloured photographs of vulgar society', Nancy Rose Marshall; Vulgar India from nabobs to nationalism: imperial reversals and the mediation of art, Julie F. Codell; Afterword: how Victorian was vulgarity?, John Kucich; Index.