Laurence W. Mazzeno

Victorian literature’s fascination with the past, its examination of social injustice, and its struggle to deal with the dichotomy between scientific discoveries and religious faith continue to fascinate scholars and contemporary readers. During the past hundred years, traditional formalist and humanist criticism has been augmented by new critical approaches, including feminism and gender studies, psychological criticism, cultural studies, and others. In Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature, twelve scholars offer new assessments of Victorian poetry, novels, and nonfiction. Their essays examine several major authors and works, and introduce discussions of many others that have received less scholarly attention in the past. General reviews of the current status of Victorian literature in the academic world are followed by essays on such writers as Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and the Brontë sisters. These are balanced by essays that focus on writing by women, the development of the social problem novel, and the continuity of Victorian writers with their Romantic forebears. Most importantly, the contributors to this volume approach Victorian literature from a decidedly contemporary scholarly angle and write for a wide audience of specialists and non-specialists alike. Their essays offer readers an idea of how critical commentary in recent years has influenced—and in some cases changed radically—our understanding of and approach to literary study in general and the Victorian period in particular. Hence, scholars, teachers, and students will find the volume a useful survey of contemporary commentary not just on Victorian literature, but also on the period as a whole.

Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature

Sue Norton

This volume explores the theme of age and aging, uniquely combining personal reflections from literature professors with sound scholarly analysis of a range of fiction and poetry. Bringing together leading literary scholars, this collection of essays covers a range of writers and texts, representing both the canon and new voices. By combining the chapter authors' expertise as literary and cultural critics with their own responses to novels, short stories and poems, the book offers new insights into the life trajectories made available to fiction and poetry readers through compelling narrative and vivid literary representation.

Criticism and Reflections by Professors of Literature

Fiction and Poetry to Help Us Age

The works selected for inclusion in this bibliography have remained among the most read and studied in undergraduate classes on the novel or on Victorian literature. The bibliography is arranged alphabetically by author and title. For each author, a general bibliography is included. The citations provide references to readily accessible works that discuss the author's life and achievements, often providing comparisons with contemporaries or with novelists of other periods. After each title, a number of citations point the student to books or chapters in books providing a detailed discussion of the individual works by the ever popular Victorian novelists.

An Annotated Bibliography

The Victorian Novel

James Lee Burke is an acclaimed writer of crime novels in which protagonists battle low-life thugs who commit violent crimes and corporate executives who exploit the powerless. He is best known for his Dave Robicheaux series, set in New Orleans and the surrounding bayou country. With characters inspired by his own family, Burke uses the mystery genre to explore the nature of evil and an individual's responsibility to friends, family and society at large. This companion to his works provides a commentary on all of the characters, settings, events and themes in his novels and short stories, along with a critical discussion of his writing style, technique and literary devices. Glossaries describe the people and places and define unfamiliar terms. Selected interviews provide background information on both the writer and his stories.

A Literary Companion

James Lee Burke

This is an eclectic collection of essays from a group of international scholars tackling various subjects on Victorian literature—from studies of specific authors such Charles Dickens’ early and later works, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and novels by Thomas Hardy to more general discussions, such as the depictions of women in Victorian novels.

Alfred Tennyson was a poet all his life, writing more than a thousand works in virtually every poetic genre. Considered by his Victorian contemporaries the pre-eminent poet of the age, he has become a canonical figure who is widely read and studied today. Consequently, his poems appear on the syllabi of both survey courses in Victorian literature as well as upper-division and graduate-level topics courses that cover Victorian studies or address subjects such as environmental studies, religion, elegiac poetry, and Arthurian literature. This companion makes Tennyson's poetry accessible to contemporary readers by identifying some of the formal elements of the poems, highlighting their relevance to Tennyson's Victorian contemporaries, and explaining their enduring appeal and value. Entries in the companion, organized alphabetically, provide essential details about Tennyson's most anthologized poems, offer suggestions for reading and interpretation, and elucidate unfamiliar historical and literary allusions. Additional entries, a biography of Tennyson, and a selected bibliography of recent criticism offer information about the people, places, events, and issues that influenced Tennyson or were important to him and his contemporaries.

A Companion

Alfred Tennyson

Ronald D. Morrison

This collection includes twelve provocative essays from a diverse group of international scholars, who utilize a range of interdisciplinary approaches to analyze “real” and “representational” animals that stand out as culturally significant to Victorian literature and culture. Essays focus on a wide range of canonical and non-canonical Victorian writers, including Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Anna Sewell, Emily Bronte, James Thomson, Christina Rossetti, and Richard Marsh, and they focus on a diverse array of forms: fiction, poetry, journalism, and letters. These essays consider a wide range of cultural attitudes and literary treatments of animals in the Victorian Age, including the development of the animal protection movement, the importation of animals from the expanding Empire, the acclimatization of British animals in other countries, and the problems associated with increasing pet ownership. The collection also includes an Introduction co-written by the editors and Suggestions for Further Study, and will prove of interest to scholars and students across the multiple disciplines which comprise Animal Studies.

Contexts for Criticism

Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture

Laura Dabundo

Written for readers at all levels, this book situates Jane Austen in her time, and for all times. It provides a biography; locates her work in the context of literary history and criticism; explores her fiction; and features an encyclopedic, readable resource on the people, places and things of relevance to Austen the person and writer. Details on family members, beaux, friends, national affairs, church and state politics, themes, tropes, and literary devices ground the reader in Austen's world. Appendices offer resources for further reading and consider the massive modern industry that has grown up around Austen and her works.

Jane Austen

A new edition of the classic reference source offers 2,220 entries with all of the titles from the 1996 edition reviewed for currency, accuracy, biased language, and the quality of critical analysis, along with 438 new titles.

Masterplots

This Critical Insights volume on Pride and Prejudice is designed to provide students and nonspecialists in Austen studies an introduction to one of the most widely read novels of the past two centuries. New essays include a biography of Jane Austen, the critical reception of Pride and Prejudice, an examination of the novel's historical milieu, and a reading of the novel that stresses the importance Austen places on female education as a means of redefining the role of women in society. Other essays include an examination of the relationship between form and content in the novel, and several essays written from a feminist perspective.

Pride and Prejudice

Frank Northen Magill

Dayton Kohler

A new edition of the classic reference source offers 1,801 entries with all of the titles in the 1976 edition reviewed for currency, accuracy, and the quality of critical analysis, along with 425 new titles.

1,801 Plot Stories and Critical Evaluations of the World's Finest Literature

Corey Evan Thompson

This reference work covers both Herman Melville's life and writings. It includes a biography and detailed information on his works, on the important themes contained therein, and on the significant people and places in his life. The appendices include suggestions for further reading of both literary and cultural criticism, an essay on Melville's lasting cultural influence, and information on both the fictional ships in his works and the real-life ones on which he sailed.

Herman Melville

Traces Hemingway's critical fortunes over the ninety years of his prominence, telling us something about what we value in literature and why scholarly reputations rise and fall.

Shaping an American Literary Icon

The Critics and Hemingway, 1924-2014

Thomas Hardy enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a novelist before devoting his talents to writing poetry for the remainder of his life. This book focuses on Hardy's remarkable achievements as a novelist. Although Victorian readers considered some of his works controversial, his novels remained highly regarded. His novels still appear in the syllabi of courses in Victorian literature and the British novel, as well as courses in feminist/gender studies, environmental studies, and other topics. For scholars, students, and the general reader, this companion helps to makes Hardy's novels accessible by providing a detailed biography of Hardy, plot summaries of each novel, and analyses of the critical contexts surrounding them. Entries focus on the people, cultural forces, literary forms, and movements that influenced Hardy's novels. The companion also suggests approaches for original interpretations and suggestions for further study.

A Companion to the Novels

Thomas Hardy

A comprehensive look at the academic criticism of Jane Austen from her time down to the present.

Two Centuries of Criticism

The twelve essays in Victorian Environmental Nightmares explore various “environmental nightmares” through applied analyses of Victorian texts. Over the course of the nineteenth century, writers of imaginative literature often expressed fears and concerns over environmental degradation (in its wide variety of meanings, including social and moral). In some instances, natural or environmental disasters influenced these responses; in other instances a growing awareness of problems caused by industrial pollution and the growth of cities prompted responses. Seven essays in this volume cover works about Britain and its current and former colonies that examine these nightmare environments at home and abroad. But as the remaining five essays in this collection demonstrate, “environmental nightmares” are not restricted to essays on actual disasters or realistic fiction, since in many cases Victorian writers projected onto imperial landscapes or wholly imagined landscapes in fantastic fiction their anxieties about how humans might change their environments—and how these environments might also change humans.

Victorian Environmental Nightmares

A collection of essays that perceive Updike's America through the eyes of Western and Eastern European readers and scholars, contributing to Updike scholarship while demonstrating his resonance across the Atlantic

European Perspectives on John Updike

A study of the journalistic and academic reception of the writings of one of the great American writers of the late twentieth century.

Critical Reception, 1958-2010

Becoming John Updike

﻿ James Lee Burke is an acclaimed writer of crime novels in which protagonists battle low-life thugs who commit violent crimes and corporate executives who exploit the powerless. He is best known for his Dave Robicheaux series, set in New Orleans and the surrounding bayou country. With characters inspired by his own family, Burke uses the mystery genre to explore the nature of evil and an individual’s responsibility to friends, family and society at large. This companion to his works provides a commentary on all of the characters, settings, events and themes in his novels and short stories, along with a critical discussion of his writing style, technique and literary devices. Glossaries describe the people and places and define unfamiliar terms. Selected interviews provide background information on both the writer and his stories.

Laurence W. Mazzeno

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