Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1850s

Examining the literature of a profoundly influential decade by some of the century's major writers, this volume brings new primary material to light whilst also re-reading it through today's critical and political preoccupations and approaches, including with race, gender, and the environment.

Establishing a fresh critical paradigm, this volume shows how the 1850s was significantly defined by forms of increasing intellectual, class, and geographical mobility. It saw the flourishing of major Victorian writers, including George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Charles Kingsley, Anthony Trollope, Tennyson, and Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Outputs by these writers were read alongside a variety of other genres, including travel writings, learned society reports, statistical returns, popular journalism, working-class writing, and scientific papers in a period which saw an increasing availability of cheap printed matter. Intertextuality and interdisciplinarity are not only key to this volume, but are also one of the most important legacies of the literature of the 1850s. Contributors are attentive to a plethora of voices, disciplines, and forms of knowledge which they read through rigorous 21st-century critical priorities including diversity, cultural and physical geography, and the environment.