Deborah Denenholz Morse

Mark W. Turner

Margaret Markwick

Bringing together leading and newly emerging scholars, The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope offers a comprehensive overview of Trollope scholarship and suggests new directions in Trollope studies. The first volume designed especially for advanced graduate students and scholars, the collection features essays on virtually every topic relevant to Trollope research, including the law, gender, politics, evolution, race, anti-Semitism, biography, philosophy, illustration, aging, sport, emigration, and the global and regional worlds.

The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope

New Men in Trollope's Novels challenges the popular construction of Victorian men as patriarchal despots and suggests that hands-on fatherhood may have been a nineteenth-century norm. Beginning with an evaluation of the evidence for cultural determinations of masculinity during Trollope's times, Markwick sets the stage with a discussion of the religious, philosophical, and educational influences that informed the evolution of Trollope's personal views of masculinity as he grew from boyhood into later manhood. Her treatment of his novels, drawing on a wide selection from across the oevre, shows that sensitive examination of Trollope's texts discovers him advancing a startlingly modern model of manhood under a veneer of conformity. Trollope's independent views on child-rearing, education, courtship, marriage, parenthood, and gay men are also discussed within the context of Victorian culture in this witty, original, and immensely knowledgeable study of Victorian masculinity.

Rewriting the Victorian Male

New Men in Trollope's Novels

Trollope is usually seen as a faithful mirror of Victorian England, both in providing intimate details of contemporary life and in endorsing the moral attitudes and certainties of the period. His powers of empathy make his characters convincing and knowable in an astonishing way. Yet the Victorians restricted women to the house and severely limited their rights and opportunities. Trollope and Women examens the conundrum of how a great novelist could both accept the conventional values of the time and yet be able to see and sympathise with the impossible situations in which Victorian women often found themselves. Margaret Markwick shows the individuality of Trollope's women: even conventional Angel in the House heroines, like Mary Lowther in The Vicar of Bullhampton, can surprise us at times. More tellingly, he cannot help giving some of his less angelic characters, such as the vivacious Lizzie Eustace in the Eustace Diamonds, his unwilling admiration. His range extends beyond simple romance to the realistic handling of marriages, both happy and unhappy, and to the treatment of bigamy and scandal. He shows men and women getting on together as well as fighting bitterly. Nor are Trollope's novels as devoid of sex as has often been thought.

Margaret Markwick

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