A History of Victorian Literature

Note on Citations xiii

Introduction: Locating Victorian Literature 1

Byron is Dead 1

Cultural Contexts 2

The Literary Field 11

An Age of Prose 14

The Situation of Poetry 19

Victorian Theater 21

The Novel After Scott 22

1 "The Times are Unexampled": Literature in the Age of Machinery, 1830–1850 27

Constructing the Man of Letters 27

The Burdens of Poetry 33

Theater in the 1830s 48

Fiction in the Early 1830s 50

Dickens and the Forms of Fiction 55

Poetry after the Annuals 66

Literature of Travel 70

History and Heroism 73

Social Crisis and the Novel 81

The Domestic Ideal 84

From Silver-Fork to Farce 86

Poetry in the Early 1840s 89

The Literature of Labor 95

Medievalism 98

"The Two Nations" 101

"What's Money After All?" 111

Romance and Religion 116

The Novel of Development 123

Art, Politics, and Faith 127

In Memoriam 137

2 Crystal Palace and Bleak House: Expansion and Anomie, 1851–1873 143

The Novel and Society 145

Crimea and the Forms of Heroism 156

Empire 164

Spasmodics and Other Poets 168

The Power of Art 182

Realisms 187

Two Guineveres 194

Sensation 200

Dreams of Self-Fashioning 207

Narrating Nature: Darwin 215

Novels and their Audiences 218

Literature for Children 228

Poetry in the Early 1860s 232

Criticism and Belief 244

The Pleasures of the Difficult 250

The Hellenic Tradition 259

Domesticity, Politics, Empire, and the Novel 267

After Dickens 275

The Persistence of Epic 282

Poisonous Honey and Fleshly Poetry 286

3 The Rise of Mass Culture and the Specter of Decline, 1873–1901 293

Science, Materialism, and Value 296

Twilight of the Poetic Titans 305

The Decline of the Marriage Plot 314

The Aesthetic Movement 325

Aesthetic Poetry 329

Life-Writing 333

Morality and the Novel 342

Romance 351

Regionalism 356

The Arrival of Kipling 360

Fiction and the Forms of Belief 365

Sex, Science, and Danger 370

Fictions of the Artist 375

Decadence 377

Drama in the 1880s 381

The New Woman in Fiction 386

Decadent Form 394

The Poetry of London 400

Yeats 405

The Scandal of Wilde 408

Poetry After Wilde 411

Fictions of Decline 416

Conrad 423

Epilogue 429

Works Cited 435

Index 451