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The following is a list of some relevant period texts and critical material. I have included some works that, if slightly dated, still contain useful information. In addition, I encourage you to consult the MLA Bibliography (through the Marriott Library web page) and other bibliographies that you may encounter in the works below.
N.B.: I have placed all asterisked texts on reserve at Marriott Library. This is particularly the case for books and articles required for class presentations. Texts available on-line are not on reserve. If you are having difficulty acquiring certain readings, let me know and I will place them on reserve.
‘Period’ and slightly later works
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869)
Walter Benjamin, "Baudelaire," "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction" (1936), Illuminations
Robert Buchanan, "The Fleshly School of Poetry" (1871) and D. G. Rossetti,
"The Stealthy School of Criticism" (1871) in The Broadview Anthology
of Victorian Poetry
*Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (1877)
_________, "The Book of the Machines." Erewhon (1872)
Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (1840). Fans middle-class fears.
_____________, Past and Present (1843). Contrasts the industrial period
to medievalism.
_____________, "Signs of the Times" (1828) Selected Writings. On ‘the
age of machinery.’
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859); The Descent of Man (1871)
Peter Gaskell, Artisans and Machinery (1836). A social investigation
of Manchester by Elizabeth Gaskell’s cousin. Liberally plagiarized
by Engels.
G. M. Hopkins, "Author’s Preface" (1883) in The Broadview Anthology
of Victorian Poetry
*Thomas Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (1894).
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Discusses
the alienation of labor.
J. S. Mill, On the Subjection of Women (1859).
Florence Nightingale, Cassandra (1854). On vocations for women.
Walter Pater, "Preface and Conclusion to the Renaissance" (1873) in
The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry
John Ruskin, "The Nature of Gothic" (1851-3), The Genius of John
Ruskin. On aesthetics and industrial labor.
*___________, "Of Queen’s Gardens," in Sesame and Lilies (1865).
Xerox on reserve. A classic statement of domestic ideology.
__________, Unto This Last (1862). On economics, labor, the origins
of value.
Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903), On Individuality
and Social Forms. On ‘shock’ and modern personality.
Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (1859)
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904)
H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific
Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1902)
Virginia Woolf, "The Angel in the House," "Professions for Women,"
A Woman's Essays
Victorian Culture
Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy,
1815-1848 (1980)
Jerome Buckley, The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture (1951).
Useful, if dated, generalizations.
Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of
the British Working Class (1995). Revises E. P. Thompson’s conclusions.
H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolf, ed. The Victorian City (1973)
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979).
Studies the French context, but influential nonetheless.
_____________, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1978). See Foucault
above.
*Alfred Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments
for Capitalism before Its Triumph (1977). See Part 3.
Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (1957).
See Buckley.
Gareth Steadman Jones, The Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class
History (1983). Responds to Thompson; views Chartism more conservatively.
Cora Kaplan, "Pandora’s box: subjectivity, class and sexuality in socialist
feminist criticism." Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (1985).
Relates these concerns to Jane Eyre.
Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (1994).
David Newsome, The Victorian World Picture: Perceptions and Introspections
in an Age of Change (1997). A good general history.
Thomas Richards, Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising
and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (1990)
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1994)
*Wolfgang Schivelbush, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of
Time and Space in the 19th Century (1977).
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
(1986). On class and pollution from a Bakhtinian perspective; see chapters
3-4 especially.
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1966). A classic
historical text.
F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History
of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900 (1988)
Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial
Spirit, 1850-1980 (1981)
*Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958). See
especially Chapter 5 on "The Industrial Novel." A good place to start
on Victorian intellectual history.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973). Good on London,
Manchester, and Hardy’s Wessex.
The Victorian Novel
Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness
in Victorian Culture (1993)
*Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History
of the Novel (1987). Path-breaking treatment of domesticity and sexuality.
Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination
(1981). A classic in novel studies.
*Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century
Writing (1987). An excellent literary history on the politics of deformity.
Rosemary Bodenheimer, The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction
(1988)
Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in
Britain, 1832-1920 (1991). Also on autobiography, other genres.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and 19th-Century Literary Imagination (1979). The inauguratory feminist
study.
Arnold Kettle, ed. The 19th-Century Novel: Critical Essays and Documents
(1981)
*John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction (1987). A Foucauldian
approach. Better than its title lets on.
John Lucas, The Literature of Change: Studies in the 19th-Century Provincial
Novel (1977).
Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction
(1996). Chapters on Jane Eyre and Mill on the Floss
Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European
Culture (1987). Excellent genre study.
Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in
Mid-Victorian England (1988).
Alan Rauch, Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March
of Intellect (2001).
Donald Sutherland, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (1989)
Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (1961). Classic
formal readings.
Igor Webb, From Custom to Capital: The English Novel and the Industrial
Revolution (1981)
Victorian Poetry
*Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics
(1993). The generally acknowledged favorite.
Joseph Bristow, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (2000)
*Matthew Campbell, Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (1999). On Tennyson,
Browning, Hopkins, Hardy.
Barbara Charlesworth, Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in
Victorian Poetry (1965). Later poets.
Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle
(1986).
Anthony H. Harrison, Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture (1998).
Medievalism in Tennyson, religious discourse in Christina Rossetti.
Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart (1992).
Christina Rossetti and Michael Field.
Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in
Modern Literary Tradition (1957). A classic, especially concerning the
relation between Victorian and Romantic poetics.
Dorothy Mermin, The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets (1983).
James Richardson, Vanishing Lives: Style and Self in Tennyson, D.G.
Rossetti, Swinburne, and Yeats (1988)
Owen Schur, Victorian Pastoral: Tennyson, Hardy, and the Subversion
of Forms (1989). Mostly on short lyrics.
W. David Shaw, Origins of the Monologue: The Hidden God (1999).
Good poetic readings and conclusions about Victorian agnosticism.
Ann Brontë, Tenant of Wildfell
Hall
Elizabeth Hollis Berry, Anne Brontë's Radical Vision: Structures
of Consciousness (1994)
Laura Berry, "Acts of Custody and Incarceration in Wuthering
Heights and TWH." Novel 30: 1 (Fall 1996): 32-55.
Jan B. Gordon, "Gossip, Diary, Letter, Text: Ann Brontë’s Narrative
Tenant and the Problematic of the Gothic Sequel." ELH 51:4 (Winter 1984):
719-45.
Tess O’Toole, "Siblings and Suitors in the Narrative Architecture of
TWH." Studies in English Literature 39:4 (Aut 1999): 715-31.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
See the excellent set of bibliographies in your Bedford edition.
Some of the most influential approaches are by Armstrong, Gilbert and Gubar,
Meyer, and Poovey. See also:
Gayatri Spivak, "Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,"
Critical Inquiry 12:1 (Autumn 1985): 243-61. An important response
to Gilbert and Gubar on JE’s feminist and colonialist politics.
Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology
(1996). An excellent historical treatment.
Carolyn Williams, "Closing the Book in Jane Eyre," Victorian Connections,
ed. Jerome J. McGann (1989).
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
*Articles in Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Linda H. Peterson
(Bedford, 1992): Wion, "The Absent Mother in Wuthering Heights"; Homans,
"The Name of the Mother in WH"; Miller, "WH: Repetition and the ‘Uncanny’";
Eagleton, "Myths of Power"; Armstrong, "Imperialist Nostalgia and WH."
*Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History
of the Novel (1987).
Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës
(1975)
Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion
of Domestic Ideology (1989)
John P. Farrell, "Reading the Text of Community in WH," ELH 56:1 (Spring
1989) 173-208. On-line.
Margaret Homans, "Repression and Sublimation of Nature in WH," PMLA
93 (1978) 9-19.
*Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women's Fiction
(1996). Reads WH in a colonial context.
Walter L. Reed, "Heathcliff: The Hero out of Time," Meditations on
the Hero (1974)
*Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (1953). Influential
formalist reading.
Robert Browning
Isobel Armstrong, ed. Robert Browning (1974). Critical Essays
Carol Christ, "Browning’s Corpses," Victorian Poetry 33 (Autumn-Winter
1995): 391-401.
Dwight Culler, "Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue," PMLA 90 (1975):
366-85.
Melissa Valiska Gregory, "Robert Browning and the Lure of the Violent
Lyric Voice." Victorian Poetry 38:4 (Winter 2001): 491-510. On web.
Loy D. Martin, Browning's Dramatic Monologues and the Post-Romantic
Subject (1985)
Cornelia Pearsall, "Browning and the Poetics of the Sepulchral Body."
Victorian Poetry 30:1 (Spring 1992): 43-61.
Herbert F. Tucker, Browning’s Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure (1980)
See also Armstrong, Campbell, Bristow, Langbaum, and Shaw ("Victorian
Poetry").
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
David Guest, "Acquired Characters: Cultural vs. Biological Determinism
in WAF." English Literature in Transition 34:4 (1991): 283-92.
Thomas L. Jeffers, Samuel Butler Revalued (1981)
Peter Morton, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination,
1866-1900 (1984).
Ralf Norrman, Samuel Butler and the Meaning of Chiasmus (1986)
Charles Dickens, Short pieces
John Carey, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens' Violent Imagination
(1991)
Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender, and Literature
in the Nineteenth Century (1994)
Humphrey House, The Dickens World (1941). A classic on Dickensian style.
*Jill L. Matus, "Trauma, Memory and Railway Disaster: The Dickensian
Connection." Victorian Studies 43:3 (Spring 2001) 413-33
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (1977)
Dorothy Van Ghent, "The Dickens World: A View from Todgers’s," The
Sewanee Review 58:3 (Summer 1950). On ‘animation.’
Raymond Williams, "Dickens and Social Ideas," Dickens 1970, ed. Michael
Slater (1970). On ‘flat’ characters and ideology.
George Eliot, Mill on the Floss
Dorothea Barrett, Vocation and Desire: George Eliot’s Heroines (1989)
Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot and 19th-Century Fiction (1983).
Kathleen Blake, Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature
(1983)
*Harold Bloom, ed. George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1988). Useful
collection: influential articles by Levine, Jacobus, Beer, etc.
Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory
and Fictional Form (1984). Responds to Hillis Miller.
John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction (1987). On altruism, self-negation,
and community.
Jules Law, "Water Rights and the ‘crossing o’ breeds’: Chiastic Exchange
in the MF." Rewriting the Victorians, ed. Linda M Shires (1992)
Alan Rauch, Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March
of Intellect (2001). Chapter on knowledge and MF
*Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and 19th-Century Science: The Make-Believe
of a Beginning (1984)
Kathryn Stockton, God between Their Lips: Desire between Women in Irigaray,
Brontë, and Eliot (1994). Influential queer readings
Alexander Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail (1985). On knowledge in
GE.
See also Gilbert and Gubar, Kucich, Meyer, Rauch ("Victorian Novel")
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of
the English Working Class
W. O. Henderson, Marx and Engels and the English Workers (1989)
Aruna Krishnamurthy, "’More Than Abstract Knowledge’: Friedrich Engels
in Industrial Manchester." Victorian Literature and Culture 28:2 (2000):
427-4. On web.
Michael Levin, The Condition of England Question: Carlyle, Mill, Engels
(1998)
Georg Lukacs, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,"
History and Class Consciousness (1968). A classic text on alienation.
*Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (1974). Discusses
Engels in the context of Victorian novels.
Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation,
and the City (1995). On Engels’s gender politics.
John M. Sherwood, "Engels, Marx, Malthus, and the Machine." American
Historical Review 90:4 (Oct 1985): 837-65. On web. On Engels’
technological determinism - considered influential but also historically
inaccurate.
Michael Field
Terrence Holt, "The Tiresian poet: Michael Field." Victorian Women
Poets: A Critical Reader (1996), ed. Angela Leighton.
*Yopie Prins, "A Metaphorical Field: Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper,"
Victorian Poetry 33:1 (Spring 1995) 129-48.
_________, "Sappho Doubled: Michael Field," Dwelling in Possibility:
Women Poets and Critics on Poetry (1995), ed. Yopie Prins and Maeera Schreiber.
Ana I. Parejo Vadillo. "Sight and Song: Transparent Translations and
a Manifesto for the Observer." Victorian Poetry 38:1 (Spring 2000): 15-34.
On web. Discusses Field, Pater, and aesthetics.
See Dowling and Leighton ("Victorian Poetry").
G. M. Hopkins
Harold Bloom, ed. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1985). Critical essays.
*Francis L. Fennell, ed. Rereading Hopkins: Selected New Essays (1996)
Lesley Higgins, "’To prove him with hard questions’: Answerability
in Hopkins’ Writings." Victorian Poetry 39:1 (2001): 37-68.
Margaret Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Tractarian Poetry (1997)
Maria R. Lichtmann, The Contemplative Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
(1989)
Paul Mariani, "The Unshapeable Shock Night: Pain, Suffering, and the
Redemptive Imagination." America (Feb. 20, 1999): 16-21.
Julia F. Saville, A Queer Chivalry: The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard
Manley Hopkins (2000)
See Armstrong, Campbell, Langbaum, Richardson, and Shaw ("Victorian
Poetry")
Marx and Engels
Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner
(1995)
*Ann Cvetkovich, "Marx’s Capital and the Mystery of the Commodity,"
Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism
(1992). Reads Capital as a sensation novel.
W. O. Henderson, Marx and Engels and the English Workers (1989)
Michael Levin, The Condition of England Question: Carlyle, Mill, Engels
(1998)
*Georg Lukacs, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,"
History and Class Consciousness (1968).
*Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (1974). Discusses
Engels in the context of Victorian novels.
Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation,
and the City (1995). On Engels’s gender politics.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton
*Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and 19th-Century
Writing (1987). On MB’s comparison of the working class to Frankenstein’s
monster.
Rosemarie Bodenheimer, "Private Grief and Public Acts in MB," Dickens
Studies Annual 9 (1981) 195-216.
Deirdre D’Albertis, Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the
Victorian Social Text (1997). On Gaskell’s shifting tone.
Joseph Childers, Novel Possibilities: Fiction and the Formation of
Early Victorian Culture (1995)
*Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction,
1832-1867 (1985). Excellent treatment of genre, domesticity, and Unitarianism.
W. R. Greg, "Review of Mary Barton" (1849) in Elizabeth Gaskell: The
Critical Heritage (1991): 163-187. The most influential contemporary
review of this work.
Patricia Ingham, The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in
the Victorian Novel (1996)
Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation,
and the City (1995). On MB and public life.
Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864
(1995). On MB and political economy.
Hilary Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and
the Victorian Novel (1992). On politics and narrative technique.
Sheila Smith, The Other Nation: The Poor in English Novels of the 1840s
and 1850s (1980)
*Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958). Views MB
as losing its political nerve.
Susan Zlotnick, Women, Writing, and the Industrial Revolution (1998)
Thomas Hardy, early poetry
Tim Armstrong, Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (2000)
Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1972)
Barbara Hardy, Thomas Hardy Imagining Imagination: Hardy's Poetry and
Fiction (2000)
Trevor Johnson, A Critical Introduction to the Poems of Thomas Hardy
(1991)
*Phillip Mallett, ed. The Achievement of Thomas Hardy (2000). Critical
essays.
J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (1970)
Edward Neill, "Back to the Future: Hardy, Poetry, Theory, Aporia."
Victorian Poetry 36:1 (Spring 1998): 75-95.
I. A. Richards, "Some Notes on Hardy’s Verse Forms." Victorian Poetry
17: 1-2 (Spring-Summer 1979): 1-8.
Dennis Taylor, Hardy’s Poetry, 1860-1928 (1981)
John Whitehead, Hardy to Larkin: Seven English Poets (1995)
See Armstrong, Campbell, and Schur ("Victorian Poetry").
The Woman in White
Patrick Brantlinger, "What is 'Sensational' about the 'Sensation Novel'?"
19th-Century Fiction 37:1 (June 1982) 1-28. On-line.
*Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(1985). Psychoanalytic reading.
*Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian
Sensationalism (1992). Excellent.
Carolyn Dever, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian
Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (1998). Psychoanalytic approach.
Tamar Heller, "The Portrait of the Artist as a Professional Man," Dead
Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic (1992).
Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the
1860s (1977)
Walter Kendrick, "The Sensationalism of The Woman in White," 19th-Century
Fiction 32:1 (June 1977) 18-35. On-line.
*Jonathan Loesberg, "The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction,"
Representations 0:13 (Winter 1986) 115-138. On-line.
*D. A. Miller, "Cage aux folles: Sensation and Gender in WC's Woman
in White," The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the
19th Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (1987); also in
The Novel and the Police (1988)
*Lyn Pykett, ed. Wilkie Collins (St. Martin’s, 1998). A helpful edited
collection of essays.
*Cannon Schmitt, "Written on the Body: The Sensational Nation in Matthew
Arnold and WC," Alien Nation: 19th-Century Gothic Fictions and English
Nationality (1997)
Our Mutual Friend
John Carey, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens' Violent Imagination
(1991)
*Deirdre David, Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels (1981).
On narrative closure, politics, and realism.
Stanley Friedman, "The Motif of Reading in OMF" 19th-Century Fiction
28:1 (June 1973) 38-61. On-line.
*Catherine Gallagher, "The Bio-Economics of OMF," Fragments for a History
of the Human Body, Part 3, ed. Michael Feher (1989) 344-365. On the origins
of value in OMF and Ruskin.
Michal Peled Ginsburg, "The Case against Plot in Bleak House and OMF,"
ELH 59: 1 (Spring 1992) 175-195. On-line.
Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial
Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (1997)
Humphrey House, The Dickens World (1941). A classic on Dickensian style.
*Albert D. Hutter, "Dismemberment and Articulation in OMF," Dickens
Studies Annual 11 (1983) 135-175.
*John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction (1987). On the mechanics
of desire in OMF.
Nancy Aycock Metz, "The Artistic Reclamation of Waste in OMF" 19th-Century
Fiction 34:1 (June 1979) 59-72. On-line.
Harland S. Nelson, "Dickens's OMF and Henry Mayhew's London Labour
and the London Poor," 19th-Century Fiction 20:30 (Dec. 1965) 207-222. On-line.
Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864
(1995). On economic speculation in OMF.
Barry V. Qualls, "Savages in a 'Bran-new' World: Carlyle and OMF" Studies
in the Novel 10: 2 (Summer 1978) 199-217.
*Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Homophobia, Misogyny, and Capital: The Example
of OMF," Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985).
Influential queer reading.
Michael Steig, "Dickens's Excremental Vision," Victorian Studies 13
(1970) 339-354.
Garrett Stewart, "The 'Golden Bower' of OMF," ELH 40:1 (Spring 1973)
105-130. On-line.
Dorothy Van Ghent, "The Dickens World: A View from Todgers’s," The
Sewanee Review 58:3 (Summer 1950). On ‘animation.’
*Raymond Williams, "Dickens and Social Ideas," Dickens 1970, ed. Michael
Slater (1970). On ‘flat’ characters and ideology.
Mayhew
Catherine Gallagher, "The Body versus the Social Body in the Works
of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew," The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality
and Society in the 19th Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur
(1987)
*Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination
in the 19th Century (1991). Excellent.
Harland S. Nelson, "Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Henry Mayhew's
London Labour and the London Poor," 19th-Century Fiction 20:30 (Dec. 1965)
207-222. On-line.
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
(1986). Chapter 3.
Middlemarch
Dorothea Barrett, Vocation and Desire: George Eliot’s Heroines (1989)
*Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot and 19th-Century Fiction (1983). Excellent.
_________, George Eliot (1986)
Patrick Brantlinger, The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics,
1832-1867 (1977).
Kathleen Blake, Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature
(1983)
*Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory
and Fictional Form (1984). Responds to Hillis Miller.
Barbara Hardy, Particularities: Readings in George Eliot (1982)
*Barbara Hardy, J. Hillis Miller, and Richard Poirier, "Middlemarch,
Chapter 85: Three Commentaries," 19th-Century Fiction 35:3 (Dec 1980) 432-453.
On-line.
Neil Hertz, "Recognizing Casaubon," The End of the Line: Essays on
Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (1985)
*John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction (1987). On altruism,
self-negation, and community.
*David Lodge, "Middlemarch and the Idea of the Classic Realist Text,"
The 19th-Century Novel: Critical Essays and Documents, ed. Arnold Kettle
(1981). On GE’s narrator.
*D. A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in
the Traditional Novel (1981). Responds to Hillis Miller.
*J. Hillis Miller, "Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch," Worlds of Victorian
Fiction, ed. Jerome Buckley (1975). Influential post-structuralist reading.
Alan Mintz, George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation (1978)
K. M. Newton, "The Role of the Narrator in George Eliot’s Novels,"
Journal of Narrative Technique 3:2 (May 1973) 97-107.
Nancy L. Paxton, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism,
and the Reconstruction of Gender (1991)
*John Peck, ed. Middlemarch: New Casebooks (St. Martin’s, 1992).
Contains abridged articles by Beer ("M and the Woman Question"), Blake,
Graver, Lodge, D. A. Miller, J. Hillis Miller, Shuttleworth, and others.
A good general source.
Leah Price, "George Eliot and the Production of Consumers," Novel 30:2
(Winter 1997) 145-169.
Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and 19th-Century Science: The Make-Believe
of a Beginning (1984)
*Kathryn Bond Stockton, God between Their Lips: Desire between Women
in Irigaray, Brontë, and Eliot (1994). Influential queer reading of
spirituality in GE.
Alexander Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail (1985). On knowledge in
GE.
Joseph Wiesenfarth, "Middlemarch: The Language of Art," PMLA 97:3 (May
1982) 363-377.
T. R. Wright, "Middlemarch as a Religious Novel, or Life Without God,"
Images of Belief in Literature, ed. David Jaspar (1984)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
*Articles in Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, ed. John Paul
Riquelme (Bedford, 1998): Gallagher, "Hardy's Anthropology of the Novel";
Rooney, "Tess and the Subject of Sexual Violence," Wicke, "Standards and
Standardization in TH's Tess."
*Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot and 19th-Century Fiction (1983)
Charlotte Bonica, "Nature and Paganism in Hardy's Tess of D," ELH 49:4
(Winter 1982) 849-862. On-line.
David J. DeLaura. "The Ache of Modernism in Hardy's Later Novels,"
ELH 34 (1967). On-line.
*Catherine Gallagher, "Tess of D: Hardy's Anthropology of the Novel,"
Tess of D, ed. Riquelme (Bedford, 1998). Influential New Historicist reading.
Marjorie Garson, Hardy's Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text (1991)
Ian Gregor. The Great Web: The Form of Hardy's Major Fiction (1974).
Genre criticism.
Margaret R. Higgonet, ed. The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on
Hardy (1993).
D. H. Lawrence, "Study of Thomas Hardy" (1936), Phoenix: The Posthumous
Papers of D. H. Lawrence
John Lucas, The Literature of Change: Studies in the 19th-Century Provincial
Novel (1977)
*J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition (1982). A post-structuralist
reading.
Jeff Nunokawa, "Tess, Tourism, and the Spectacle of the Woman," Rewriting
the Victorians, ed. Linda Shires (1992)
*Elaine Scarry, "Work and the Body in Hardy and Other 19th-Century
Novelists," Representations 3 (Summer 1983) 90-123. On-line.
Kaja Silverman, "History, Figuration, and Female Subjectivity in Tess
of D," Novel 18:1 (Fall 1984) 5-28.
*Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973)
*Peter Widdowson, ed. On Thomas Hardy: Late Essays and Earlier
(St. Martin's, 1998). Another helpful collection.
George Wotton, Thomas Hardy: Towards a Materialist Criticism (1985).
A post-Marxist, historical study.
Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market
and other poems
*Articles in Mary Arsensau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen
Kooistra, ed. The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian
Contexts (Ohio UP, 1999): Maxwell, "Tasting the ‘Fruit Forbidden’"; Menke,
"The Political Economy of Fruit"; Kooistra, "Visualizing the Fantastic
Subject."
Joseph Bristow, "'No Friend like a Sister?': Christina Rossetti's Female
Kin," Victorian Poetry 33:2 (Summer 1995) 257-281.
*Elizabeth Campbell, "Of Mothers and Merchants: Female Economics in
Christina Rossetti's GM," Victorian Studies 33:3 (Spring 1990) 393-410.
Diane D’Amico, Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender and Time (1999). Emphasis
on Rossetti’s Anglican influences.
Rod Edmond, Affairs of the Hearth: Victorian Poetry and Domestic Narrative
(1988). First chapter.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and 19th-Century Literary Imagination (1979).
Elizabeth Helsinger, "Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: C. Rossetti’s
GM,'" ELH 58:4 (Winter 1991) 903-933. On web.
Terrence Holt, "'Men sell not such in any town': Exchange in GM," Victorian
Poetry 28:1 (Spring 1990) 51-67.
Helena Michie, "'There is no Friend Like a Sister': Sisterhood as Sexual
Difference," ELH 56:2 (Summer 1989) 401-421. On-line.
Jerome McGann, "The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti." Critical
Inquiry 10 (1983): 127-44
See Armstrong, Dowling, Harrison, and Leighton ("Victorian Poetry);
see also Gilbert and Gubar ("Victorian Novel").
D. G. Rossetti
John Barclay, "Consuming Artifacts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Aesthetic
Economy." Victorian Poetry35 (Spring 1997) 1-21.
J.B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting,
Poetry, and Criticism (1998)
*David G. Riede, ed. Critical Essays on Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1992)
David G. Riede, ed. Dante Gabriel Rossetti Revisited (1992)
Jerome McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must Be Lost
(2000)
*Thaïs Morgan, "Victorian Effeminacies," Victorian Sexual Dissidence,
ed. Richard Dellamora (1999): 109-25. On Buchanan’s attack on D. G. Rossetti
and Swinburne.
Lynne Pearce, Woman/ image/ text: Readings in Pre-Raphaelite Art and
Literature (1991).
Joan Rees, The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Modes of Self-Expression
(1981)
Lise Rodgers, "The Book and the Flower: Rationality and Sensuality
in ‘Jenny.’" Pre-Raphaelite Poets, ed. Harold Bloom (1986): 21-34.
*D. G. Rossetti special issue of Victorian Poetry, ed. William E. Fredeman
20:3-4 (1982)
Harold L. Weatherby, "Problems of Form and Content in the Poetry of
D. G. Rossetti." Victorian Poetry 2 (1964) 11-19
See Armstrong, Charlesworth, Dowling, and Richardson ("Victorian Poetry").
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Paul Alkon, Science Fiction before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology
(2002)
Peter Brooks, "What is a Monster (According to Frankenstein)." Body
Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (1993)
Denise Gigante, "Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein." ELH 67:2
(Summer 2000): 565-87. On web.
Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (1993).
A historical study of monstrosity.
Barbara Johnson. "My Monster/ My Self." Diacritics 12:2 (Summer
1982): 2-10.
*George Levine, U. C. Knoepflmacher, and Peter Dale Scott, eds. The
Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary
Shelley's Novel (1979). Excellent essays by Brooks, Ellis,
Knoepflmacher, and Moers.
Ellen Moers. "Female Gothic" in Endurance of Frankenstein (see above)
Franco Moretti. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of
Literary Forms (1983)
Ronald Paulson, "Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution." ELH 48:3
(Fall 1981): 532-54.
Mary Poovey. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984)
*Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Complete Authoritative Text…, ed. Joanna
Smith (Bedford, 2000). Contains an excellent set of bibliographies.
Gayatri Spivak, "Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,"
Critical Inquiry 12:1 (Autumn 1985): 243-61.
See Gilbert and Gubar, Kucich, Meyer, and Rauch ("Victorian Novel").
A. C. Swinburne
Elizabeth A. Guzynski, "Oedipus is Burning: Fate, Desire, and Masochism
in Algernon Charles Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon." Nineteenth-Century
Literature 54 (1999): 202-29. On web.
Anthony Harrison. "Swinburne’s Losses: The Poetics of Passion." ELH
49 (1982): 689-706.
Margot K. Louis, Swinburne and His Gods: The Roots and Growth of an
Agnostic Poetry (1990)
Jerome McGann, "‘Ave atque Vale’: An Introduction to Swinburne." Victorian
Poetry 9:1-2 (Spring-Summer 1971): 145-163
Kerry McSweeney, Tennyson and Swinburne as Romantic Naturalists (1981)
*Thaïs Morgan, "Victorian Effeminacies," Victorian Sexual Dissidence,
ed. Richard Dellamora (1999): 109-25. On Buchanan’s attack on D. G. Rossetti
and Swinburne.
Rikky Rooksby and Nicholas Shrimpton, ed. The Whole Music of Passion:
New Essays on Swinburne (1993)
Robin Spencer, "Whistler, Swinburne and Art for Art's Sake." After
the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, ed. Elizabeth
Prettejohn (1999)
*A. C. Swinburne special issue of Victorian Poetry, ed. Cecil Lang
9:1-2 (Spring-Summer 1971)
A. N. Wilson, "Swinburne and the Gods." God's Funeral (1999)
See Armstrong, Charlesworth, Dowling, and Richardson ("Victorian Poetry").
Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriamand
other poems
*Sarah Gates, "Poetics, Metaphysics, Genre: The Stanza Form of IM."
Victorian Poetry 37:4 (Winter 1999): 507-19
T. S. Eliot, "In Memoriam" (1936). The Victorian Age, ed. Robert Langbaum
(1969). Eliot’s stamp of approval.
Donald S. Hair, Domestic and Heroic in Tennyson's Poetry (1981)
Linda K. Hughes, The Manyfaced Glass: Tennysons's Dramatic Monologues
(1985)
*Special issue on In Memoriam, Victorian Poetry 18:2 (Summer 1980)
Gerhard Joseph, "Producing the ‘Far-off interest of Tears’: Tennyson,
Freud, and the Economics of Mourning." Victorian Poetry 36:2 (Summer 1998):
123-33.
Gerhard Joseph, Tennyson and the Text: The Weaver's Shuttle (1992)
James R. Kincaid, Tennyson’s Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns
(1980)
Timothy Peltason, Reading In Memoriam (1985)
*Herbert F. Tucker, ed. Critical Essays on Alfred Lord Tennyson (1993)
Herbert F. Tucker, "Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism." PMLA 98:1
(Jan 1983): 8-20.
*Rebecca Stott, ed. Tennyson (1996)
See Armstrong, Bristow, Campbell, Harrison, Langbaum, and Richardson
("Victorian Poetry").
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
Most of the below approaches are genre studies of science fiction.
Paul Alkon, Science Fiction before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology
(2002)
Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific
Romances (1961). A classic.
Richard Hauer Costa, "The Rescue of H. G. Wells." English Literature
in Transition 3 (1985): 42-58.
Peter Haining, ed. The H. G. Wells Scrapbook (1978)
John Huntington, ed. Critical Essays on H. G. Wells (1991)
Patrick McCarthy, "Heart of Darkness and the Early Novels of H. G.
Wells: Evolution, Anarchy, Entropy." Journal of Modern Literature 13:1
(Mar 1986): 37-60.
Colin Manlove, "Charles Kingsley, H. G. Wells, and the Machine in Victorian
Fiction." Nineteenth-Century Literature 48: 2. (Sep., 1993): 212-39. On
web.
Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction,
and Prophecy (1995)
*Mark Rose, Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (1976).
Classic essays on the genre by Lem, Rabkin, Scholes, Sontag, and Suvin
William J. Scheick, ed. The Critical Response to H. G. Wells (1995)
Darko Suvin, "On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre" Science
Fiction, ed. Mark Rose (see above). Still path-breaking.
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