Rereading Victorian Fiction [Paperback]

This book offers a collection of essays on novels and short stories from the beginning of Victoria's reign through to the end of the nineteenth century and into our own times. The essays represent a wide range of critical and theoretical viewpoints on fiction, and they deal with a number of lesser-known Victorian Works as well as with some of the most canonical texts of the period. The chronological range of the volume is extended by essays which explore Victorian texts' connections with earlier literature, as well as by studies of twentieth-century novelists' responses to Victorian fiction. Overall this collection emphasizes the breadth and diversity of Victorian prose fiction and will be of interest to students and specialists alike.Foreword; J.Sutherland List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: A.Jenkins and J.John Victorian Realistic Prose and Sentimentality: P.Davis Having the Whip-hand in Middlemarch ; D.Karlin Two Kinds of Clothing: Sartor Resartus and Great Expectations ; B.Beatty Re-reading G.W.Reynolds' the Mysteries of London ; T.Thomas The State of Dracula : Bureaucracy and the Vampire; G.Day The Godhead Regendered in Victorian Children's Literature; J.M. Labbe Alice : Reflections and Relativities; M.Irwin Place. Identity and Born in Exile ; R.Pite Stages of Sand and Blood: the Performance of Gendered Subjectivity in Olive Schreiner's Colonial Allegories; S.McCracken Sexual Ethics in Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman Writers; J.Larson Don Pickwick: Dickens and the Transformations of Cervantes; A.Easson Using the Victorians: the Victorian Age in Contemporary Fiction; R.Gilmour Women, Spiritualism and Depth Psychology in Mich?le Robert's Victorian Novel; S.Rowland Index

'The confident pluralism of this collection presents Victorian fiction to a new generation of readers.' - Dinah Birch, Times Literary Supplement