Victorian Fiction Beyond the Canon

✍ Scribed by Daragh Downes, Trish Ferguson (eds.)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 273
• Series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book is about selected Victorian texts and authors that in many cases have never before been subject to sustained scholarly attention. Taking inspiration from the pioneeringly capacious approach to the hidden hinterland of Victorian fiction adopted by scholars like John Sutherland and Franco Moretti, this energetically revisionist volume takes advantage of recent large-scale digitisation projects that allow unprecedented access to hitherto neglected literary texts and archives. Blending lively critical engagement with individual texts and close attention to often surprising trends in the production and reception of prose fiction across the Victorian era, this book will be of use to anyone interested in re-evaluating the received meta-narratives of Victorian literary history.With an afterword by John Sutherland

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xi
Introduction: Exploring the Hinterland of Victorian Fiction....Pages 1-15
Prize Novelists and Condensed Novels: Thackeray and Bret Harte....Pages 17-29
Before New Grub Street: Thomas Miller and the Contingencies of Authorship....Pages 31-44
Emboldening the Weak: The Early Fiction of James Anthony Froude....Pages 45-70
George Borrow: The Scholar, The Gipsy, The Priest....Pages 71-86
Sensation Fiction as Social Activism: Charles Reade’s It Is Never Too Late to Mend and Felicia Skene’s Hidden Depths ....Pages 87-103
Sheer Luck, Holmes? Clues Towards Canon Formation in Victorian Detective Fiction....Pages 105-123
Politics of the Strange and Unusual: Mesmerism and the Medical Professional in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘Dr.Carrick’ (1878)....Pages 125-142
Silas K. Hocking, Her Benny, and the Poetics of the Prolific....Pages 143-161
Henry Hawley Smart’s The Great Tontine and the Art of Book-Making....Pages 163-179
Double Standards: Reading the Revolutionary Doppelgänger in The Prophet’s Mantle ....Pages 181-199
Richard Marsh and the Realist Gothic: Pursuing Traces of an Evasive Author in His Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction....Pages 201-217
Dat Cura Commodum or A Portrait of a Deviant Mind: Arthur Griffiths’s The Rome Express, John Milne’s ‘The Express Series’ and Late-Victorian Detective Fiction....Pages 219-237
Afterword from the Hinterland....Pages 239-247
Back Matter....Pages 249-273

✦ Subjects

British and Irish Literature;Nineteenth-Century Literature