British culture in the 1880s and 1890s was marked by a strong sense of decline. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle examines the ways in which perceptions of loss were cast into archetypal stories that sought to account for the culture's troubles and assuage its anxieties. By examining the work of a wide range of writers--from Kipling to Wilde, from Stevenson to Stoker--Stephen Arata shows how the nation's twin obsessions with decadence and imperialism became intertwined in the thought of the period.

It has been widely recognised that British culture in the 1880s and 1890s was marked by a sense of irretrievable decline. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle explores the ways in which that perception of loss was cast into narrative, into archetypal stories which sought to account for the culture's troubles and perhaps assuage its anxieties. Stephen Arata pays close attention to fin de siecle representation of three forms of decline - national, biological and aesthetic - and reveals how late Victorian degeneration theory was used to 'explain' such decline. By examining a wide range of writers - from Kipling to Wilde, from Symonds to Conan Doyle and Stoker - Arata shows how the nation's twin obsessions with decadence and imperialism became intertwined in the thought of the period. His account offers new insights for students and scholars of the fin de siecle.

New Grub Street is the only one of George Gissing's two dozen novels never to have gone out of print, and has long been recognized as the most important novel of the nineteenth century on the subject of the writing professions. Indeed, no novel in the English tradition even remotely approximates the thoroughness, sophistication, and clear-sightedness with which New Grub Street explores the social and economic contexts in which writing, publishing, and reading take place. The critical introduction to this edition gives an account of Gissing's life and times and an overview of the most important stylistic and thematic features of New Grub Street; special attention is given to the writing and publishing professions in late-Victorian England, emphasizing the range of social and economic positions that writers occupied during the period. This Broadview edition also includes a rich selection of historical material on the literary world of London through the centuries, authorship as a profession, and Gissing's life and work.

The first book-length study to specifically examine the many intersections in the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad, this volume extends the focus of current debate beyond the writers' South Seas literature. Considering Stevenson and Conrad's shared literary history and experience of Victorian London, it examines their convergence of styles in the emergent modernism of the fin de siecle, their romance and adventure modes, their fictions of duality, and their exploration of the human psyche. Moreover, the book recuperates Stevenson's reputation as a serious writer, not only as Conrad's antecedent and influence but as a writer equally worthy of study in these shared modes.