A History of Victorian Literature (eBook)

James Eli Adams is Professor of English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (1995); the general editor of the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era (2004); and co-editor of Sexualities in Victorian Britain (1996).

Preface xi

Note on Citations xv

Introduction: Locating Victorian Literature 1

Byron is Dead 1

Cultural Contexts 2

The Literary Field 11

An Age of Prose 14

The Situation of Poetry 19

Victorian Theater 21

The Novel After Scott 22

1 "The Times are Unexampled": Literature in the Age of
Machinery, 1830-1850 27

Constructing the Man of Letters 27

The Burdens of Poetry 33

Theater in the 1830s 48

Fiction in the Early 1830s 50

Dickens and the Forms of Fiction 55

Poetry after the Annuals 66

Literature of Travel 70

History and Heroism 73

Social Crisis and the Novel 81

The Domestic Ideal 84

From Silver-Fork to Farce 86

Poetry in the Early 1840s 89

The Literature of Labor 95

Medievalism 98

"The Two Nations" 101

"What's Money After All?" 111

Romance and Religion 116

The Novel of Development 123

Art, Politics, and Faith 127

In Memoriam 137

2 Crystal Palace and Bleak House: Expansion and
Anomie, 1851-1873 143

The Novel and Society 145

Crimea and the Forms of Heroism 156

Empire 164

Spasmodics and Other Poets 168

The Power of Art 182

Realisms 187

Two Guineveres 194

Sensation 200

Dreams of Self-Fashioning 207

Narrating Nature: Darwin 215

Novels and their Audiences 218

Literature for Children 228

Poetry in the Early 1860s 232

Criticism and Belief 244

The Pleasures of the Difficult 250

The Hellenic Tradition 259

Domesticity, Politics, Empire, and the Novel 267

After Dickens 275

The Persistence of Epic 282

Poisonous Honey and Fleshly Poetry 286

3 The Rise of Mass Culture and the Specter of Decline,
1873-1901 293

Science, Materialism, and Value 296

Twilight of the Poetic Titans 305

The Decline of the Marriage Plot 314

The Aesthetic Movement 325

Aesthetic Poetry 329

Life-Writing 333

Morality and the Novel 342

Romance 351

Regionalism 356

The Arrival of Kipling 360

Fiction and the Forms of Belief 365

Sex, Science, and Danger 370

Fictions of the Artist 375

Decadence 377

Drama in the 1880s 381

The New Woman in Fiction 386

Decadent Form 394

The Poetry of London 400

Yeats 405

The Scandal of Wilde 408

Poetry After Wilde 411

Fictions of Decline 416

Conrad 423

Epilogue 429

Works Cited 435

Index 451

"An award-winning overview of Victorian literature, considering key
figures and their works." (Bookseller Buyer's Guide, 1
August 2011)

"This is a beautifully written, truly intelligent book that
understands the Victorians. Reading this volume was a pleasure that
brought home rather forcefully the relatively functional nature of
so much professional academic prose." (Victorian Studies,
Spring 2010)

"This elegant and far-reaching book offers a surprising source
of optimism to those working in the humanities in Higher
Education." (Dickens Quarterly, 2010)

"Throughout his prose is clear and unpretentious--in short,
entirely appropriate for his intended audience. Though specialists
may quibble over what Adams chooses to omit from this concise
account, this book is a remarkable achievement." (CHOICE,
October 2009)

"...its breadth of coverage is staggering. It includes all the
major figures and genres of the age, hosts of relatively minor
authors and works, and all the important subgenres. Also, by
placing the individual works in their ever-shifting literary and
cultural milieus, it provides a depth of insight lacking in more
narrowly conceived studies.... Also, it may well stimulate an
exploration of the work of such important but neglected authors as
Ainsworth, Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton, not to mention such utterly
forgotten authors as Catherine Gore. Adams, in fact, seems to have
read so much of the relatively minor and currently neglected
literature of the entire period, and writes about it with such
gusto and infectious enthusiasm that he extends the breadth and
depth of the entire field of Victorian studies and will doubtless
inspire specialists as well as less advanced students of the period
to read works they might otherwise have viewed as expendable. The
book is indeed so replete with valuable insights into so many works
and authors that the reader who has taken in its chronological
sweep by reading from the introduction through the epilogue will
undoubtedly return over and over again via the index to review the
readings of particular works". (New Books Online, September
2009)

"Herbert F Tucker's foreword to James Eli Adams's History of
Victorian Literature waxes lyrical about its achievement in
terms extravagant enough to arouse suspicion." (Victorian
Studies, Spring 2010)

"A signal work of literary historiography: broad and sound in its
fabric, detail richly textured in its detail.... The sheer quantity
of this comprehensive history is matched by the genial quality of
the historian who comprehends it, and whose infectiously
self-renewing enthusiasm makes great learning look like great fun.
It has been many decades, and several major reorientations in
critical scholarship, since we last saw a literary-historical
synopsis on this scale."

--Herbert F. Tucker, University of Virginia