Long 19th Century and Victorian Literature
Bridging the historical gap between Romanticism and Twentieth-Century Modernism, this period features literature which reflects the huge technological and political developments of the age, as well as, in Britain at least, the seismic shift from a largely rural lifestyle to a largely urban one. It is also a period of empire and globalism, and its literature celebrates, critiques, and interrogates this.
Important figures such as Oscar Wilde and Charles Darwin are represented in our authors’ studies, but also broader topics including the Great Exhibition of 1851, globalisation and liberalisation, early film and moving picture practices, working-class dialect poetry, and the fascinating connections between technology and nineteenth-century verse.
Works on Long 19th Century and Victorian literature by our departmental staff
Wilde in the Dream Factory
Hollywood is haunted by the ghost of playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde. This is the story of his haunting, told for the first time. Set within the rich evolving context of how the American entertainment industry became cinema, and how cinema become the movies, it reveals how Wilde helped to shape Hollywood in the early twentieth century.
Discussing films including Bringing Up Baby, Underworld, and Laura, alongside definitive adaptations of Wilde's works, including, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lady Windermere's Fan, and Salome, Wilde in the Dream Factory revises how we understand both Wilde's afterlife and cinema's beginnings.
Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology
This book repositions thinking about rhythm, meter and versification during the “Mechanical Age.” Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, the book examines the rhythmical workings of poems alongside not only Victorian theories of prosody and poetics but also contemporary thinking about labor practices, pedagogical procedures, scientific experiments, and technological innovations.
By offering an exploded definition of meter—one that extends beyond conventional foot-based scansion—this book explicates the conceptual and, at times, material exchanges between poetic meter and machine culture. The machines of meter include mid-century theories of abstraction and technologies of smoothness and even spacing; a deeply influential, though rarely credited, system of metrical manufacture; verse produced by a Victorian automaton; the mechanics of the human body and mind and the meters that issued from them; and the promise of scientific machines to resolve metrical dilemmas once and forall.
Popular Visual Shows 1800–1914
Popular Visual Shows 1800–1914: Picturegoing from Peep Shows to Film tells the story of the growth of picturegoing as a popular habit between 1800 and 1914. Encouraged by urbanization and changes in transportation, education, and leisure patterns, the regular and widespread provision of exhibitions and shows became a defining characteristic of cultural life.
Drawing on a wealth of new evidence, this book details the visual shows that were on offer, where and what they were, the networks and infrastructure they existed within, and, above all, how their audiences experienced them.
Literatures of Liberalization
This book traces the global circulation of cultures and ideologies from the technological and democratic revolutions of the long 19th century to liberal and neoliberal modernity. Focusing on moments of coerced (colonial and postcolonial) and voluntary contact rather than national boundaries, Gagnier draws attention to the global scope of literatures and geopolitical commodities as actants in world affairs, as in processes of liberalisation, democratisation, and trade, but also to the distinctiveness of each local environment at its moment of transculturation.
The Collected Poems of Williffe Cunliam
'Williffe Cunliam' was the pen name of the Burnley blacksmith and poet, William Cunliffe (1833-94). During his brief but productive poetic career Cunliffe published fifty-four poems in his local newspaper, the Burnley Free Press and General Advertiser (which became the Burnley Gazette) between 1863 and 1866.
The exceptional quality of dialect poems including 'Settling th' War', 'Hoamly Chat', and 'Th' Petched Shirt' have now been recognised by literary critics, journalists, and the general public, and Cunliffe's work has been quoted in the Guardian, the Sunday Times, and on BBC Radio. Now, however, for the first time in a century-and-a-half, the complete known work of this extraordinary working-class Victorian poet can be read by everyone.
This volume includes all fifty-four poems published by 'Williffe Cunliam', an introduction on the literary and historical contexts of the work, and notes on each of the poems. In April 2024 Richard Morrison of the Times wrote ‘I will be giving The Collected Poems of Williffe Cunliam pride of place on my bookshelf alongside Hardy, Eliot, Dickens and all those other writers who gave us such richly detailed pictures of Victorian England.’
Individualism, Decadence and Globalization
Beginning with a widespread definition of Decadence as when individual parts flourish at the expense of the whole, Gagnier shows the full range of meanings of individualism at the height of its promise. From Darwin and Mill to the Fin de Siècle and beyond, Gagnier establishes the individual in relation to its theoretical and practical contexts: the couple and parent/ child dyad; the workshop and community; the nation and state; cosmopolis and world-citizenship.
Some highlights include: evolutionary and developmental sciences of the individual; Spencerian Individualists; Arnoldian Culturalists; New Women, Female Aesthetes, and Socialist Individualists; Philosophy of the Will; Gypsy Lorists and Cultural Philanthropists; Cosmopolitans; doctrine of mystical substitution of the one for the many
After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind
‘What is emotion?’ pondered the young Charles Darwin in his notebooks. How were the emotions to be placed in an evolutionary framework? And what light might they shed on human-animal continuities? These were among the questions Darwin explored in his research, assisted both by an acute sense of observation and an extraordinary capacity for fellow feeling, not only with humans but with all animal life.
After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind explores questions of mind, emotion and the moral sense which Darwin opened up through his research on the physical expression of emotions and the human–animal relation. It also examines the extent to which Darwin’s ideas were taken up by Victorian writers and popular culture, from George Eliot to the Daily News.
Bringing together scholars from biology, literature, history, psychology, psychiatry and paediatrics, the volume provides an invaluable reassessment of Darwin’s contribution to a new understanding of the moral sense and emotional life, and considers the urgent scientific and ethical implications of his ideas today.
Globalization and the Great Exhibition
This book examines the Great Exhibition as a decisive moment in the formation of a capitalist world picture. In so doing it foregrounds a vision of peace and progress which took hold of British society, within the Crystal Palace and beyond. It emphasizes too that this Victorian understanding of global order legitimized imperial ambition.
Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century
Over the course of the nineteenth century, women in Britain participated in diverse and prolific forms of artistic labour. As they created objects and commodities that blurred the boundaries between domestic and fine art production, they crafted subjectivities for themselves as creative workers.
By bringing together work by scholars of literature, painting, music, craft and the plastic arts, this collection argues that the constructed and contested nature of the female artistic professional was a notable aspect of debates about aesthetic value and the impact of industrial technologies. All the essays in this volume set up a productive inter-art dialogue that complicates conventional binary divisions such as amateur and professional, public and private, artistry and industry in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between gender, artistic labour and creativity in the period.
Ultimately, how women faced the pragmatics of their own creative labour as they pursued vocations, trades and professions in the literary marketplace and related art-industries reveals the different ideological positions surrounding the transition of women from industrious amateurism to professional artistry.
