Late Victorian into Modern

Edited by Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr

Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature

A collection of original essays by international experts in the field
Wide-ranging and interdisciplinary discussions of the literature and culture of the period
Includes work by both established and emerging scholars
Engages with recent debates on the continuities between the Victorian and the modern

Late Victorian into Modern

Edited by Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr

Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature

Description

The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate.

This volume opens up, in new and innovative ways, a range of dimensions, some familiar and some more obscure, of late Victorian and modern literature and culture, primarily in British contexts. Late Victorian into Modern emphasises the in-between: the gradual changeover from one period to the next. The volume examines shared developments, points out continuities rather than ruptures, and explores and exploits an understanding of the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries as a cultural moment in which new knowledges were forming with particular speed and intensity. The organising principle of this book is to retain a key focus on literary texts, broadly understood to include familiar categories of genre as well as extra-textual elements such as press and publishing history, performance events and visual culture, while remaining keenly attentive to the inter-relations between text and context in the period. Individual chapters explore such topics as Celticism, the New Woman, popular fictions, literatures of empire, aestheticism, periodical culture, political formations, avant-garde poetics, and theatricality.

Late Victorian into Modern

Edited by Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr

Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature

Introduction
Twilights
1: Medievalism and Modernity, Marcus Waithe
2: Mythology, Empire, and Narrative, Jarad Zimbler
3: Death Drives: Biology, Decadence, and Psychoanalysis, Stefano Evangelista
4: Celticism, Daniel Williams
Making it New
5: Cultures of the Avant-Garde, Christos Hadjiyiannis
6: Hannah Sullivan, Hannah Sullivan
7: When was Modernism?, Michael H. Whitworth
8: What was the 'New Drama'?, Sos Eltis and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr
9: Who was the New Woman?, Angelique Richardson
10: Utopian Thought and the Way to Live Now, Anne Fernihough
Modes and Genres
11: Naturalism, Realism, and Impressionism, Adam Parkes
12: Naturalism, Realism, and Impressionism, Adrian Hunter
13: Moon Voyaging, Selenography and the Scientific Romance, Matthew Taunton
14: Super-niches?: Detection, Adventure, Exploration and Spy Stories, David Glover
Sites and Spaces of Knowledge
15: Scientific Formations, Rachel Crossland
16: Spirit Worlds, Tatiana Kontou
17: Cityscapes, Laurence Scott
18: Regionalisms, Penny Fielding
19: The View from Empire: the Turn-of-the-Century Globalizing World, Elleke Boehmer
Minds and Bodies
20: Race and Biology, William Greenslade
21: The Will to Forget: Amnesia, the Nation, and Ulysses, Vincent J. Cheng
22: The Posthuman Spirit of the Neo-Pagan Movement, Dennis Denisoff
23: Theatre and the Sciences of Mind, Tiffany Watt-Smith
24: The Theatre of Hands: Writing the First World War, Santanu Das
25: Children's Literature and Literatures of Childhood, Marah Gubar
26: Intersexions: Dandyism, Cross-Dressing, Transgender, Jana Funke
Political and Social Selves
27: Political Formations: Anarchism, Feminism, Socialism, Ruth Livesey
28: 'The End of Laissez-Faire': Literature, Economics, and the Idea of the Welfare State, Benjamin Kohlmann
29: Representing Work, Sos Eltis
Authorship, Aesthetics, and Print Cultures
30: Reading Aestheticism, Decadence, and Cosmopolitanism, Michèle Mendelssohn
31: Parodies, Spoofs, and Satires, James Williams
32: Life-Writing: Biography, Portraits and Self-portraits, Masked Authorship and Autobiografictions, Max Saunders
33: Journalism and Periodical Culture, Faith Binckes
34: The Illustrated Book, Kamilla Elliott
Technologies
35: The Coming of Cinema, Laura Marcus
36: Literature and Photography, Kate Flint
37: Electricity, Telephony, and Communications, Sam Halliday
38: The Residue of Modernity: Technology, Anachronism, and Bric-à-Brac in India, Alexander Bubb
39: Stagecraft: Puppets, Masks, and Machines, Olga Taxidou

Late Victorian into Modern

Edited by Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr

Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature

Author Information

Edited by Laura Marcus, Goldsmiths' Professor of English, New College, Oxford, Michèle Mendelssohn, Associate Professor of English and American Literature, Mansfield College, Oxford, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies, St. Catherine's College, Oxford

Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths' Professor of English at the University of Oxford, where she is a Professorial Fellow of New College. Her book publications include Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (1994), Virginia Woolf: Writers and their Work (1997/2004), The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007; awarded the 2008 James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association), Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2015), and, as co-editor, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (2004). Her current research project includes a study of the concept of 'rhythm' in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a range of disciplinary contexts.

Michèle Mendelssohn is Associate Professor at University of Oxford and Deputy Director of the Rothermere American Institute. She is the author of Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Aesthetic Culture (2007) and co-editor of Alan Hollinghurst: Writing Under the Influence (2016).

Kirsten Shepherd-Barr is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Catherine's College. Her books include Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (2006), Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (2015), and Modern Drama: A Very Short Introduction (2016).

Contributors:

Faith Binckes, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Bath Spa University, UK
Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, Wolfson College, University of Oxford, UK
Alexander Bubb, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, Department of English, King's College London, UK
Vincent John Cheng, Shirley Sutton Thomas Professor of English, University of Utah, USA
Rachel Claire Crossland, Senior Lecturer, University of Chichester, UK
Santanu Das, Reader in English Literature,King's College, London, UK
Dennis Denisoff, Professor of English, Ryerson University, Canada
Kamilla Elliott, Professor of Literature and Media, Lancaster University, UK
Sos Eltis, Tutorial Fellow in English, Brasenose College, University of Oxford, UK
Stefano-Maria Evangelista, Associate Professor; Tutorial Fellow, Trinity College, Oxford, UK
Anne Fernihough, Non-Stipendiary Fellow in English at Girton College, University of Cambridge, UK
Penny Fielding, Grierson Chair of English Literature, University of Edinburgh, UK
Kate Flint, Provost Professor of Art History and English, University of Southern California, Dornsife, USA
Jana Funke, Advanced Research Fellow, Department of English, University of Exeter, UK
David Glover, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK.
William Greenslade, Professor of English Literature, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
Marah Jean Gubar, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Christos Hadjiyiannis, Research Fellow in English Literature, Wolfson College, Oxford, UK
Sam Halliday, Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature in the Department of English, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
Adrian Hunter, Senior Lecturer, English Studies, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Stirling, UK
Benjamin Kohlmann Assistant Professor, Englisches Seminar, University of Freiburg, Germany
Tatiana Kontou, Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
Ruth Livesey, Reader in 19th Century Literature and Thought, Department of English, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Laura Marcus, FBA, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature, New College, University of Oxford, UK
Michèle Mendelssohn, Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow, Mansfield College, University of Oxford, UK
Adam Parkes, English, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA.
Angelique Richardson, Associate Professor, English, University of Exeter, UK
Max Saunders, Fellow of the English Association, Professor of English, King's College, London, UK
Laurence Scott, College of Global Studies, Arcadia University, Glenside, Pennsylvania, USA
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies; Tutorial Fellow, St Catherine's College, University of Oxford, UK
Hannah Sullivan, Associate Professor, English, New College, University of Oxford, UK
Matthew Taunton, Lecturer, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Olga Taxidou, Professor of Drama, Department of English Literature, University of Edinburgh, UK
Tiffany Watt-Smith, British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for the History of the Emotions and School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Marcus Waithe, University Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, UK
Michael H Whitworth, Associate Professor, English, and Tutorial Fellow, Merton College, University of Oxford, UK
Daniel G. Williams, Professor of English Literature and Director of the Richard Burton Centre for the Study of Wales, Swansea University, UK
James Williams, Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, UK
Jarad Zimbler, Lecturer in Modern English Literature, University of Birmingham, UK

Late Victorian into Modern

Edited by Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr

Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature

Reviews and Awards

Shortlisted for the 2017 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize

"This collection does excellent work in tracing thematic threads through texts beyond the centrally canonicalthorough and enterprising, the collection's essays commit to diving into the archive in search of gems that deserve revisiting" - Irena Yamboliev, Journal of Victorian Culture

"Late Victorian into Modern offers an extremely useful overview of the foundational work that fostered connections between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and points to ways forwardthe collection as a whole is remarkable in its clarity, coherence, and organization" - Kristin Mahoney, Victorian Studies

Late Victorian into Modern

Edited by Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr

Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature

From Our Blog

How Oscar Wilde's life imitates his art

The idea that life imitates art is one of Oscar's best yet most often misunderstood. It is central to his philosophy and to his own life. Take The Decay of Lying, for example, an essay in the form of a dialogue that he wrote in the late 1880s. What did he call the interlocutors? Why Cyril and Vyvyan, the names of his two young sons, of course. But the piece's intellectual party really gets started when Wilde has his learned young gentlemen interview each other. Naturally, what is uppermost in their minds is the relationship between life and art.

Posted on October 16, 2017

Read the blog post