Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1870s

An original literary history that investigates and unsettles the 1870s as an era of cultural confidence and metropolitan elitism.

Alison Chapman (Edited by)

9781108845182, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 February 2025

346 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.4 cm, 0.65 kg

The 1870s were defined by cultural confidence, moral superiority, and metropolitan elitism. This volume examines and unsettles a decade closely associated with 'High Victorianism' and the popular emergence of 'Victorian' as a term for the epoch and its literature. Writers active in the 1870s were self-conscious about contemporary claims to modernity, reform, and progress, themes which they explored through conversation, conflict, and innovation, often betraying uncertainty about their era. The chapters in this volume cover a broad range of canonical and lesser known British and colonial writers, including George Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Rossettis, Emily Pfeiffer, John Ruskin, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Ellen Wood, Toru Dutt, Antony Trollope, Dinah Craik, Susan K. Phillips, Thomas Hardy, and Rolf Boldrewood. Together they offer a variety of methodologies for a pluralist literary history, including approaches based on feminism, visual cultures, digital humanities, and the history of narrative and poetic genres.

Introduction: rethinking the 1870s Alison Chapman
1. The 1870s and the invention of Victorian literature Kelly J. Mays
2. Media technologies, the organization of knowledge, and 1870s literary culture James Mussell
3. Assembling the 1870s: digital studies and literary history Emily Allen and Dino Franco Felluga
4. Feminism, reform, and the professional woman writer in the 1870s Karen Bourrier
5. The 'High Victorian' Francis O'Gorman
6. Middlemarch, high realism, and the Victorian everyday Ruth Livesey
7. The post-sensational seventies Albert D. Pionke
8. The shock of aestheticism: embodiment, abstraction, and the avant-garde as commodity Veronica Alfano
9. 'Verses, Good and Bad': ephemerality, modernity, and 1870s poetry cultures Alison Chapman
10. The comings and goings of high Victorian nonsense Anna Barton
11. Transforming pages: illustration, materiality, and the child reader in the 1870s Hannah Field
12. Literature, science, and the voice of the 1870s Gregory Tate
13. A 'sweet especial rural scene'? Nature, culture, and agriculture in the 1870s Philip Steer.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]