Product Description: Margaret Oliphant (1828-97) had a prolific literary career that spanned almost fifty years. She wrote some 98 novels, fifty or more short stories, twenty-five works of non-fiction, including biographies and historic guides to European cities, and more than three hundred periodical articles...read more

Product Description: In the nineteenth century, Shakespeare achieved the status of international pre-eminence that we recognize today. He and his major characters were depicted in statues, paintings and illustrations, and in Stratford-upon-Avon the house where he was born was purchased for the nation and the first Memorial Theatre was built...read more

Product Description: Much has been written on the cultural significance of Shakespeare, his influence on particular periods, and his appropriation and subsequent transformation. However, no book until now has specifically addressed the nature of the relationship between Shakespeare and Victorian women...read more

Situated between the Victorians and Modernism, the fin de siècle is an exciting and rewarding period to study. In the literature and art of the 1890s, the processes of literary and cultural change can be seen in action. In this, more than any previous decade, literature was an active and controversial participant within debates over morality, aesthetics, politics and science, as Victorian certainties began to break down. Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker and Olive Schreiner were among the most prominent, occasionally even notorious, writers and artists of the period, challenging establishment values and producing a distinctive literature of their own. This volume includes the main currents of radical and innovative thinking in the period, as well as the attempts to resist them. It will be of great interest to students of Victorian and twentieth-century literature, art and cultural history.

Gail Marshall looks at actresses on the English stage of the later nineteenth century, and argues that much of their work was determined by the popularity at the time of images of Classical sculpture. They were often encouraged to look as much as possible like statues, and thus to appear to their audiences as sexually desirable objects rather than creative artists. The book draws for its evidence on theatrical fictions, visual representations, and popular culture's assimilation of the sculptural image, as well as on theatrical productions.

Product Description: Victorian Shakespeare (Volume 1): Theatre, Drama, Performance ranges widely across the variety of Victorian theatrical spaces and forms in examining the ways in which the production of Shakespeare fundamentally informs the changing nature and status of the Victorian theatre...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Victorian period saw some of the most important developments in Britain's history. Rapid industrialisation, social and welfare reform, ground-breaking scientific discoveries, and an unprecedented rise in literacy, all had their impact on fiction of the time...read more