This book takes an exciting new approach to characterisation and plot in the Victorian novel, examining the vital narrative work performed by disabled characters, and demonstrating how attention to disability sheds new light on these texts' arrangement and use of bodies. It also argues that the representation of the disabled body shaped and signalled different generic traditions in nineteenth-century fiction. This wide-ranging study offers new readings of major authors including Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot and Henry James, as well as exploring lesser known writers such as Charlotte M. Yonge and Dinah Mulock Craik.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the life and work of Charlotte M. Yonge, a highly influential and popular nineteenth-century writer who is emerging from a long period of critical neglect. Its wide-ranging chapters capture the scope and quality of current work in Yonge studies, addressing the full range of her prolific literary output from her best-selling novels to her nature writing, biographies, and letters. Considering themes from gender, disability, and empire, to Tractarianism, secularism, and the idea of progress, these essays consider how Yonge reflected and shaped the tastes, ideas and anxieties of her readers and contemporaries. Exploring her key role in the Anglican revival, her importance as a test case in the development of feminist criticism, and her formal innovativeness as a novelist, this collection places Yonge centrally in the nineteenth-century literary landscape and demonstrates her ongoing relevance to scholars and students of the period.

Examines the significance of disability in nineteenth-century fiction Offers new insights into how disability shapes plot in nineteenth-century fiction Investigates the impact of a developing social category on the form of the novel, opening up ways of thinking about the intersection between novelistic characterisation and categories of social organisation Offers new readings of well-known novels by major writers such as Dickens, Eliot and James and brings these texts into conversation with work by more marginalised figures such as Yonge and Craik, considering the relationship between canon formation and the representation of disability This book takes an exciting new approach to characterisation and plot in the Victorian novel, examining the vital narrative work performed by disabled characters. It pdemonstrates the centrality of disability to the Victorian novel, demonstrating how attention to disability sheds new light on texts' arrangement and use of bodies. It also argues that the representation of the disabled body shaped and signalled different generic traditions in nineteenth-century fiction. This wide-ranging study offers new readings of major writers including Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot and Henry James, as well as exploring lesser known writers such as Charlotte M. Yonge and Dinah Mulock Craik.