Offering an in-depth overview and reappraisal of the 1860s in British literature, this innovative volume features in-depth analyses from noted scholars at the tops of their fields. Covering characteristic literary genres of the 1860s (including sensation and lyric, as well as Golden Age children's literature), and topics of current and enduring interest in the field, from empire and slavery to evolution, environmental issues and economics, it incorporates drama as well as poetry and fiction, and emphasizes the history of publishing and periodicals so important to the period. Chapters are attentive to the global context, from Ireland on the stage, to Bengali literature, to Britain's muted response to the US Civil War. The Introduction gives an overview that places these individual chapters in the historical context of the 1860s, as well as the current scholarly conversation in the field.
Introduction; 1. Realism and psychology: psychophysics, mind, and the science of human nature Rae Greiner; 2. Sensational bodies: representations of race and disability in sensation fiction Anne-Marie Beller; 3. Irish rebellion on the sensational stage Sarah Meer; 4. Palgrave's golden treasury: 'modern' poetry and a new lyric canon Marion Thain; 5. Impossible monsters, rabbit holes, and new worlds: the unstable ground of science and education in 1860s children's fairy-tale and fantasy literature Megan A. Norcia; 6. Periodicals, popular fiction and the affordances of digital collections Graham Law; 7. Publishing in the 1860s: technology, regulation, distribution Andrew King; 8. Italy in transition: Italian unification and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's last poems (1862) Patricia Cove; 9. Silent center, vocal margins: British literary response to the US Civil War Linda K. Hughes; 10. Empire and evidence in Armadale & the Morant Bay Rebellion Leah R. Rosenberg; 11. Reading the nonevental: the Victorian literary sketch, colonial urbanity, and the transimperial Sukanya Banerjee; 12. An age of mythmaking: nation and race in poetry Clare A. Simmons; 13. Reimagining society: Mill, Trollope, and the expanding electorate Kevin A. Morrison; 14. Historical Ecologies in Heterodox Economic Thought and Literary Realism of the 1860s Ayșe Çelikkol; 15. Extraction, exhaustion, and the sensation novel of the 1860s Elizabeth Carolyn Miller; 16. Evolution and the human Johnathan Smith.
Pamela K. Gilbert is Albert Brick Professor in the Department of English at the University of Florida. Her books include Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History (2019); Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels, (1997); Mapping the Victorian Social Body (2004); The Citizen's Body (2007); and Cholera and Nation (2008).
