Product Description: This comprehensive collection offers a complete introduction to one of the most popular literary forms of the Victorian period, its key authors and works, its major themes, and its lasting legacy. Places key authors and novels in their cultural and historical context Includes studies of major topics such as race, gender, melodrama, theatre, poetry, realism in fiction, and connections to other art forms Contributions from top international scholars approach an important literary genre from a range of perspectives Offers both a pre and post-history of the genre to situate it in the larger tradition of Victorian publishing and literature Incorporates coverage of traditional research and cutting-edge contemporary scholarship...read more

How cholera epidemics affected Victorian perceptions of the body and the nation.

Product Description: This book describes preaching at the royal courts during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I (1558-1625) and reconstructs the contexts--architectural, religious, political--in which the sermons were preached. The author shows how previous work has underestimated the place of religion at court, presents new evidence of the competing royal religious patronage, and reconceptualizes the careers of preachers such as Andrewes, Donne and Laud...read more

Product Description: As the idea of citizenship became more inclusive in the nineteenth century, England confronted the problem of those who seemed less fit for the responsibilities of political power. In a liberal society, fit behaviors had to originate in individual choices, rather than in coercion...read more

Product Description: Explores how medical and social maps helped shape modern perceptions of space.The cholera epidemics that plagued London in the nineteenth century were a turning point in the science of epidemiology and public health, and the use of maps to pinpoint the source of the disease initiated an explosion of medical and social mapping not only in London but throughout the British Empire as well...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Explores the various representations and imaginations of London in literature and popular culture, from Victorian times to the present day.

Product Description: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, journal editor and bestselling author of more than eighty novels during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a key figure in the Victorian literary scene. This volume brings together new essays from a variety of perspectives that illuminate both the richness of Braddon s oeuvre and the variety of critical approaches to it...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Pamela Gilbert argues that popular fiction in mid-Victorian Britain was regarded as both feminine and diseased. She discusses work by three popular women novelists of the time: M. E. Braddon, Rhoda Broughton and "Ouida". Early and later novels of each writer are interpreted in the context of their reception, showing that attitudes toward fiction drew on Victorian beliefs about health, nationality, class and the body, beliefs that the fictions themselves both resisted and exploited...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)