The fin de siecle, the period 1880-1914, long associated with decadence and with the literary movements of aestheticism and symbolism, has received renewed critical interest recently. The essays in this volume form a valuable introduction to fin de siecle cultural studies and provide a commentary on important aspects of current critical debate and the place of culture in society.

The women's sensation novel of the 1860s and the New Woman fiction of the 1890s were two major examples of a perceived feminine invasion of fiction which caused a critical furore in their day. Both genres, with their shocking, `fast' heroines, fired the popular imagination by putting female sexuality on the literary agenda and undermining the `proper feminine' ideal to which nineteenth-century women and fictional heroines were supposed to aspire. By exploring in impressive depth and breadth the material and discursive conditions in which these novels were produced, The `Improper' Feminine draws attention to key gendered interrelationships within the literary and wider cultures of the mid-Victorian and fin-de-diecle periods.

This selection of eleven essays charts the most important aspects of the developing debate about Collins's fiction in the last twenty years. Employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches - including reader response theory, narratology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, cultural materialism and a range of feminisms - these essays examine Collins's fiction from several perspectives: historical, psychological, structural, generic and political (including gender politics). They focus on an author preoccupied with the production of social and psychological identity, and with issues of class, gender and power. If there is a single issue which permeates this collection, it is the question of the subversiveness of Collins's fiction or, alternatively, its retreat from and/or containment of a radical social critique or subversive impulses. The pros and cons of this debate are explored further in Lyn Pykett's detailed and wide-ranging introduction.

The women's sensation novel of the 1860s and the new woman fiction of the 1890s were two of the most prominent examples of a perceived feminine invasion of fiction, which caused a critical furore in their day. In Victorian fiction "the proper feminine" stood for propriety, domesticity, chastity and the maternal. The women's sensation novel and the new woman fiction, with their shocking, "fast" heroines, fired the popular imagination by putting female sexuality on the literary agenda and undermining the feminine ideal. By exploring the "improper" feminine and the material and discursive conditions in which the women's sensation novel and the new woman fiction were produced, Lyn Pykett investigates the nature of this irruption of the feminine. In exploring its contemporary cultural significance, she draws attention to important gendered interrelationships within the literary and wider cultures of mid-Victorian and fin-de-siecle periods. The first comparative analysis of two key women's genres, this illuminating study will be of continuing interest for both present-day feminists and students of Victorian literature and culture.

This wide-ranging book looks at the author as a Victorian 'man of letters', and explores his cultural and critical impact, both on the definition of the novel in the 19th century and the subsequent development of the form in the 20th. It examines the full spectrum of Dickens's writing, including his journalism, work as an editor of periodicals, sketches and stories, placing his work in its contemporary context as well as reassessing it in the light of late modern/postmodern rereadings.

'it only rests with yourself to become Lady Audley, and the mistress of Audley Court' When beautiful young Lucy Graham accepts the hand of Sir Michael Audley, her fortune and her future look secure. But Lady Audley's past is shrouded in mystery, and to Sir Michael's nephew Robert, she is not all that she seems. When his good friend George Talboys suddenly disappears, Robert is determined to find him, and to unearth the truth. His quest reveals a tangled story of lies and deception, crime and intrigue, whose sensational twists turn the conventional picture of Victorian womanhood on its head. Can Robert's darkest suspicions really be true? Lady Audley's Secret was an immediate bestseller, and readers have enjoyed its thrilling plot ever since its first publication in 1862. This new edition explores Braddon's portrait of her scheming heroine in the context of the nineteenth-century sensation novel and the lively, often hostile debates it provoked. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

`Isabel Gilbert was not a woman of the world. She had read novels while other people perused the Sunday papers...she believed in a phantasmal world created out of the pages of poets and romancers.' The Doctor's Wife is Mary Elizabeth Braddon's rewriting of Flaubert's Madame Bovary in which she explores her heroine's sense of entrapment and alienation in middle-class provincial life married to a good natured but bovine husband who seems incapable of understanding his wife's imaginative life and feelings. A woman with a secret, adultery, death and the spectacle of female recrimination and suffering are the elements which combine to make The Doctor's Wife a classic women's sensation novel. Yet, The Doctor's Wife is also a self-consciously literary novel, in which Braddon attempts to transcend the sensation genre. This is the only edition of a fascinating and engrossing work, and reproduces uncut the first three-volume edition of 1864. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The fin de siecle, the period 1880-1914, long associated with decadence and with the literary movements of aestheticism and symbolism, has received renewed critical interest recently. The essays in this volume form a valuable introduction to fin de siecle cultural studies and provide a commentary on important aspects of current critical debate and the place of culture in society.

Why did turn-of-the-century England produce the kind of writing it did? This question is the mainspring of Lyn Pykett's enquiry. She offers a re-examination of the dawning of the age of modernism, exploring its origins in certain 19th-century discourses: discourses about women, discourses about gender, and other discourses that are organized in gendered terms. The text challenges the claims of both self-professed modernists, amd their later academic appropriators, that modernism represents a complete break with the past. The history of modernism has been a story of removal of the "great works" of modernist writing from the immediate material and historical circumstances of their birth, and their insertion into the timeless ideal order of the "modern tradition". Focusing on a wide range of authors, but particularly Woolf and Lawrence, this book takes issue with this historical blindness and shows how traditional views offer an impoverished response to the writing of the early 20th century.