The Victorian Literature Handbook is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to literature and culture in the Victorian period. It is a one-stop resource for literature students, providing the essential information and guidance needed from introducing the historical and cultural context to key authors, texts and genres. It includes case studies for reading literary and critical texts, a guide to key critical concepts, introductions to key critical approaches, and a timeline of literary and cultural events. Essays on changes in the canon, interdisciplinary research and current and future directions in the field lead into more advanced topics and guided further reading enables further independent work. Written in clear language by leading academics, it is an indispensable starting point for anyone beginning their study of nineteenth century literature.

This Guide introduces literature and science as a vibrant field of critical study that is increasingly influencing both university curricula and future areas of investigation. Martin Willis explores the development of the genre and its surrounding criticism from the early modern period to the present day, focusing on key texts, topics and debates.

Jack the Ripper: Media, culture, history collects together some of the best academic work on the most important and sensational murder case of the nineteenth century. Leading scholars in the fields of history, media and cultural studies debate the influence of the Whitechapel Murders on race, gender, the press, fiction, film and the city of London. This is the first collection of its kind to take the Whitechapel Murders seriously as a vital ingredient in the creation of modern Britain, and the first collection of essays from diverse fields of scholarship to offer academic analysis of the representations and influence of the Whitechapel Murders on both the nineteenth century and the contemporary world. The collection offers a range of readings of Jack the Ripper organised around the disciplinary topics of media, culture and history. Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History will be of interest to scholars of the Victorian period, particularly to those with interests in nineteenth century media, culture and history. -- .

'Sciences' were named and formed with great speed in the nineteenth century. Yet what constitutes a 'true' science? The Victorian era facilitated the rise of practices such as phrenology and physiognomy, so-called sciences that lost their status and fell out of use rather swiftly. This collection of essays seeks to examine the marginalised sciences of the nineteenth century in an attempt to define the shifting centres of scientific thinking, specifically asking: how do some sciences emerge to occupy central ground and how do others become consigned to the margins? The essays in this collection explore the influence of nineteenth-century culture on the rise of these sciences, investigating the emergence of marginal sciences such as scriptural geology and spiritualism. 'Repositioning Victorian Sciences' is a valuable addition to our understanding of nineteenth-century science in its original context, and will also be of great interest to those studying the era as a whole.

This book considers scientific performances across two centuries, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Performances include demonstrations of technologies, experiments that look like theatre, theatre that looks like science, tourist representations and natural history film-making. Its key aim is to open debate on how scientific activity, both historical and contemporary, might be understood in the context of performance studies and the imaginative acts required to stage engaging performances. Scientific performances have become increasingly of interest to historians of science, literature and science scholars, and in the field of science studies. As yet, however, no work has sought to examine a range of scientific performances with the aim of interrogating and illuminating the kinds of critical and theoretical practices that might be employed to engage with them. With scientific performance likely to become ever more central to scholarly study in the next few years this volume offer a timely, and early, intervention in the existing debates, and aims, too, to be a touchstone for future work.

A cultural history of science and science fiction Using key canonical science fiction narratives, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines examines the intersection of the literary and scientific cultures of the nineteenth century. In this original and refreshing approach to the study of early science fiction, author Martin Willis maintains that science fiction was just as important in defining the culture of the nineteenth century as other critics maintain it was in shaping the twentieth century. Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines interrogates the cultural implications of scientific development as articulated, challenged, and reformulated by science fiction. Each chapter demonstrates that both science and fiction were vital parts of a culture of imaginative and empirical practices that were continually reacting to, arguing with, and influencing one another throughout the nineteenth century. In an engrossing narrative that cites classic science fiction texts, Willis establishes a timeline for the reader so that the cultural significance of science fiction is understood and its complexity and relevance to the nineteenth century is demonstrated. Those interested in nineteenth-century history and literature, cultural studies, the history of science, and science fiction will welcome this addition to the scholarship.

This book explores the role of vision and the culture of observation in Victorian and modernist ways of seeing. Willis charts the characterization of vision through four organizing principles-small, large, past and future-to survey Victorian conceptions of what vision was. He then explores how this Victorian vision influenced twentieth-century ways of seeing, when anxieties over visual "truth" became entwined with modernist rejections of objectivity.

Essays exploring the complex relationship between literature and science. In 1959 C. P. Snow memorably described the `gulf of mutual incomprehension' which existed between `literary intellectuals' and scientists, referring to them as `two cultures'. This volume looks at the extent to which this has changed. Ranging from the middle ages to twentieth-century science fiction and literary theory, and using different texts, genres, and methodologies, the essays collected here demonstrate the complexity of literature, science, and theinterfaces between them. Texts and authors discussed include Ian McEwan's Saturday; Sheridan le Fanu; The Birth of Mankind; Franco Morretti; Anna Barbauld; Dorothy L. Sayers; The Cloud of Unknowing; George Eliot and Mary Wollstonecraft. Dr SHARON RUSTON is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Keele. CONTRIBUTORS: SHARON RUSTON, GILLIAN RUDD, ELAINE HOBBY, ALICE JENKINS, KATY PRICE, MARTIN WILLIS, BRIAN BAKER, DAVID AMIGONI

This is a one-stop resource offering a complete textbook for courses in Victorian literature."The Victorian Literature Handbook" is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to literature and culture in the Victorian period. It provides a one-stop resource for literature students, providing the essential information and guidance needed from introducing the historical and cultural context to key authors, texts and genres. It includes case studies for reading literary and critical texts, a guide to key critical concepts, introductions to key critical approaches, and a timeline of literary and cultural events. Essays on changes in the canon, interdisciplinary research and current and future directions in the field lead into more advanced topics and guided further reading enables further independent workWritten in clear language by leading academics, it is an indispensable starting point for anyone beginning their study of nineteenth century literature."Literature and Culture Handbooks" are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture. Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills.

Victorian Literary Mesmerism examines the engagement between literature and mesmerism in Victorian writing. Drawing on recent trends in interdisciplinary literary scholarship the essays collected here investigate the complex connections between scientific mesmerism, its manifestations in the Victorian social and cultural world, and the literary imagination. Here, for the first time, the varied themes and contexts shaped by mesmeric practices are brought together in one volume. Mesmerism's influence on phrenology, medicine and mental health; its interaction with the occult and with communication technologies; the effects of mesmeric principles on gender and sexuality, as well as on criminal behaviour, are all set within the context of literary texts that interrogate and critique mesmerism's influence on the Victorians. This volume will be of interest, therefore, to scholars of Victorian literature and the history of science, as well as to those interested in cultural history with a focus on gender, sexuality, and sciences of the mind.