These essays focus on major figures, major works or major themes and movements of the Victorian era. Each aims to fill the gap in critical literature while reflecting the book's recurring concern with contexts and strategems of presentation. They strive for fresh perspectives, whether it be a fuller grounding for Browning's poetry, a reconciliation of the contrary views Emerson and Nietzsche held on Carlyle's narrative techniques, a clear awareness of the role of comedy in Arnold's prose, a new chapter on English literary realism or a look at Trollope as a crucial addition to his era's exhaustive studies of changing and highly symbolic parent-child relationships. John Clubbe is co-author of "English Romanticism: The Grounds of Belief" and Jerome Meckier is author of "Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure".

Volume 12/13 of the Aldous Huxley Annual begins with a discussion of a lecture Huxley gave in Italian, an appraisal of his never-completed project of a novel on Catherine of Siena, and his recently re-discovered drawings for "Leda." Further critical articles on particular aspects of Huxley's work follow, together with the second Peter Edgerly Firchow Memorial Prize Essay by Hisashi Ozawa of King's College London. A painting by Carolyn Mary Kleefeld ushers in the second part of the book, which contains a selection of papers from the Oxford Symposium held in 2013. (Series: Aldous Huxley Annual - Vol. 12/13)

Aldous Huxley Annual is the new official organ of the Aldous Huxley Society and the Centre for Aldous Huxley Studies. It publishes larger essays on the life, times, and interests of Aldous Huxley and his circle. It aspires to be the sort of periodical that Huxley would have wanted to read and to which he might have contributed. The international Aldous Huxley Society (AHS), founded in Munster on 25 June 1998, has two chief purposes: to promote the academic study of the works of Aldous Huxley, in particular critical editions, commentaries and interpretations, and to make a wider public acquainted with the thought and writings of the author. Furthermore, the Society supports the Centre for Aldous Huxley Studies (CAHS) at the Department of English at the Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Munster, and undertakes to organize academic meetings, further academic work of its members within the scope of its authority and possibility, cooperate with other societies devoted to the academic study of the works of Aldous Huxley and send delegates to international conferences.

Aldous Huxley Annual is the official organ of the Aldous Huxley Society at the Center for Aldous Huxley Studies in Munster, Germany. The Society publishes essays on the life, times, and interests of Aldous Huxley and his circle. Volume 9 is the first to have a Guest Editor: Professor James Sexton. Sexton opens this issue with "A New Huxley Miscellany," which is followed by a selection of lectures from the Fourth International Aldous Huxley Symposium held in Los Angeles in July/August 2008. The issue closes with the first Peter Edgerly Firchow Memorial Prize Essay by Brian Smith of Suffolk University. (Series: Aldous Huxley Annual - Vol. 9)

" Dickens scholar Jerome Meckier's acclaimed Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction examined fierce literary competition between leading novelists who tried to establish their credentials as realists by rewriting Dicken's novels. In his new book, Meckier argues that in Great Expectations, Dickens not only updated David Copperfield but also rewrote novels by Lever, Thackeray, Collins, Shelley, and Charlotte and Emily Bront?. He parodically revised his competitors' themes, characters, and incidents to discredit their novels as unrealistic fairytales imbued with Cinderella motifs. Dickens darkened his fairytale perspective by replacing Cinderella with the story of Misnar's collapsible pavilion from The Tales of the Genii (a popular, pseudo-oriental collection). The Misnar analogue supplied a corrective for the era's Cinderella complex, a warning to both Haves and Have-nots, and a basis for Dickens's tragicomic view of the world.

" Victorian fiction has been read and analyzed from a wide range of perspectives in the past century. But how did the novelists themselves read and respond to each other's creations when they first appeared? Jerome Meckier answers that intriguing question in this ground-breaking study of what he terms the Victorian realism wars. Meckier argues that nineteenth-century British fiction should be seen as a network of intersecting reactions and counteractions in which the novelists rethought and rewrote each other's novels as a way of enhancing their own credibility. In an increasingly relative world, thanks to the triumph of a scientific secularity, the goal of the novelist was to establish his or her own credentials as a realist, hence a reliable social critic, by undercutting someone else's -- usually Charles Dickens's. Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, and especially George Eliot attempted to make room for themselves in the 1850s and 1860s by pushing Dickens aside. Wilkie Collins tried a different form of parodic revaluation: he strove to outdo Dickens at the kind of novel Dickens thought he did best, the kind his other rivals tried to cancel, tone down, or repair, ostensibly for being too melodramatic but actually for expressing too negative a world view. For his part, Dickens -- determined to remain inimitable -- replied to all of his rivals by redoing them as spiritedly as they had reused his characters and situations to make their own statements and to discredit his. Thus Meckier redefines Victorian realism as the bravura assertion by a major novelist (or one soon to be) that he or she was a better realist than Dickens. By suggesting the ways Victorian novelist read and rewrote each other's work, this innovative study alters present day perceptions of such double-purpose novels as Felix Holt, Bleak House, Middlemarch, North and South, Hard Times, The Woman in White, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

In 1842, Victorian England's foremost novelist visited America, naively expecting both a return to Eden and an ideal republic that would demonstrate progress as a natural law. Instead, Charles Dickens suffered a traumatic disappointment that darkened his vision of society and human nature for the remainder of his career. His second tour, in 1867-68, ostensibly more successful, proved no antidote for the first. Using new materials -- letters, diaries, and publishers' records -- Jerome Meckier enumerates the reasons for the failure of Dickens's American tours. During the first, an informal conspiracy of newspaper editors frustrated his call for copyright protection. More important, he grew less equalitarian and more British daily, a disillusioned novelist discovering his true self. His American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843--44) repudiated travel books by Tocqueville, Mrs. Trollope, and Martineau that had either viewed America as civilization's new dawn or voiced insufficient reservations. Having plumbed man's tainted hear abroad, the creator of Mr. Pickwick saw everything more satirically at home: he became a radical pessimist, a dedicated reformer who nevertheless ruled out a utopian future. Dickens's return visit, the reading tour intended to make his fortune, was an ironic second coming. Thanks to poor planning and management, ticket scalpers benefited as greatly as the much-lionized performer. Meckier argues that Dickens's business dealings with his American publishers were neither as smooth nor as lucrative as legend holds, but that the novelist's health problems and his eagerness to bring along his mistress have been much exaggerated. In fascinating counterpoint, Meckier charts the ticket speculators' systematic successes, the ups and downs of Dickens's catarrh, and the steady inroads he made into the heart of Annie Fields, his American publisher's young wife. This critical/biographical study reshapes our view of the life and career of the giant of Victorian Literatures.