Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century(Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century)

This book aims to intervene in current critical contexts for the study of nineteenth-century literature within the academy and beyond. Topics discussed include science and technology, poetry and philosophy, the Gothic, anatomical exhibitions, the global spread of liberalism, Anglo-American publishing, Punjabi popular culture and the neo-Victorian in literature, film and performance. By bringing together a broad range of intellectually challenging perspectives, the book offers an engaging critical overview of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies that will appeal both to scholars working within the field and students and teachers encountering this fascinating area of study for the first time. -- .

Introduction – Andrew Smith and Anna Barton
Part I: Critical reflections
1 On measuring the nineteenth century – John Schad
2 Literature and science – David Amigoni
3 Locke in pentameters: Victorian poetry after (or before) posthumousness – Anna Barton
4 Reading the Gothic and Gothic readers – Andrew Smith
Part II: Rethinking national contexts and exchanges
5 The global circulation of Victorian actants and ideas: liberalism and liberalisation in the niche of nature, culture, and technology – Regenia Gagnier
6 Literary folk: writing popular culture in colonial Punjab, 1885-1905 – Churnjeet Mahn
7 ‘Across the waters of this disputed ocean’: the material production of American literature in nineteenth-century Britain – Katie McGettigan
8 Gruesome models: European displays of natural history and anatomy and nineteenth-century literature – Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
Part III: Afterlives
9 Adaptive/appropriate reuse in neo-Victorian fiction: having one’s cake and eating it too – Marie-Luise Kohlke
10 Populism and ideology: nineteenth-century fiction and the cinema – Richard J. Hand
11 True histories of the Elephant Man: storytelling and theatricality in adaptations of the life of Joseph Merrick – Benjamin Poore
Index

Andrew Smith is Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield

Anna Barton is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield

‘The chapters in this collection demonstrate that the popular is definitely worth further critical scrutiny, with a careful eye on what might be added to the map, what might be deliberately or inadvertently left out, and to what purposes. Although neo-Victorian criticism never quite makes it out of its separate territory in Interventions, the book offers further evidence that Victorianists and neo-Victorianists pursue shared routes of critical investigation.’
Helen Davies, Newman University, Neo-Victorian Studies 10:2 (2018)