Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s

Explores the diverse forces that shaped developments in literature in the 1880s, an often overlooked literary decade.

Penny Fielding (Edited by), Andrew Taylor (Edited by)

9781107181908, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 October 2019

260 pages, 4 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.57 kg

What does it mean to focus on the decade as a unit of literary history? Emerging from the shadows of iconic Victorian authors such as Eliot and Tennyson, the 1880s is a decade that has been too readily overlooked in the rush to embrace end-of-century decadence and aestheticism. The 1880s witnessed new developments in transatlantic networks, experiments in lyric poetry, the decline of the three-volume novel, and the revaluation of authors, journalists and the reading public. The contributors to this collection explore the case for the 1880s as both a discrete point of literary production, with its own pressures and provocations, and as part of literature's sense of its expanded temporal and geographical reach. The essays address a wide variety of authors, topics and genres, offering incisive readings of the diverse forces at work in the shaping of the literary 1880s.

Introduction. 'Knowledge made for cutting' Penny Fielding and Andrew Taylor
1. Mermaids amongst the cables: the abstracted body and the telegraphic touch in the nineteenth century Clare Pettitt
2. Enclosing forms, opening spaces: the 1880s fixed-verse revival Linda K. Hughes
3. 'The Newest Culte': Victorian poetry and the literary societies of the 1880s Angela Dunstan
4. The time of W. E. Henley: 'minor poetry' and the 1880s Penny Fielding
5. The evolution of point of view Cannon Schmitt
6. Network, history, method: Andrew Lang in and after the 1880s Nathan K. Hensley
7. Animated conversations: form, transformation, and the category of the novel in the 1880s Barbara Leckie
8. Henry James, vulgarity, and the contexts of transatlantic moderation Andrew Taylor
9. He and She: the 1880s, camp aesthetics and the literary magazine Sara Lodge
10. Men, women and horses: public spectacle in 1887 John Stokes
11. The secular turn in British literature of the 1880s William Greenslade
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]