Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1870s

Examining the cultural confidence and metropolitan elitism identified with the 1870s, this volume establishes a new interdisciplinary literary history based on diverse authors, giving a fresh and accessible account of this key decade's debates about literature and culture as intrinsic to the Victorian era and even to 'Victorianism' itself.

The 1870s were defined by cultural confidence, moral superiority, and metropolitan elitism. This volume examines and unsettles a decade closely associated with ''High Victorianism'' and the popular emergence of ''Victorian'' as a term for the epoch and its literature. Writers active in the 1870s were self-conscious about contemporary claims to modernity, reform, and progress, themes which they explored through conversation, conflict, and innovation, often betraying uncertainty about their era. The chapters in this volume cover a broad range of canonical and lesser known British and colonial writers, including George Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Rossettis, Emily Pfeiffer, John Ruskin, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Ellen Wood, Toru Dutt, Antony Trollope, Dinah Craik, Susan K. Phillips, Thomas Hardy, and Rolf Boldrewood. Together they offer a variety of methodologies for a pluralist literary history, including approaches based on feminism, visual cultures, digital humanities, and the history of narrative and poetic genres.