Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1850s

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.

Gail Marshall is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture and Head of the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Reading. Her books include Shakespeare and Victorian Women (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Victorian Fiction (2002), and Actresses on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge University Press, 1998). She is the editor of books on Shakespeare and the Victorians, George Eliot, and the fin de siècle.

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