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  3. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Nineteenth-century literature and culture have proved a rich field for interdisciplinary studies. Since 1994, books in this series have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, gender and sexuality, race, social organisation, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought - in short, culture in its broadest sense. Many of our books are now classics in a field which since the series' inception has seen powerful engagements with Marxism, feminism, visual studies, post-colonialism, critical race studies, new historicism, new formalism, transnationalism, queer studies, human rights and liberalism, disability studies, and global studies. Theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts continue to unsettle scholarship on the nineteenth century in productive ways. New work on the body and the senses, the environment and climate, race and the decolonisation of literary studies, biopolitics and materiality, the animal and the human, the local and the global, politics and form, queerness and gender identities, and intersectional theory is re-animating the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of nineteenth-century literary studies, connecting the field with the urgent critical questions that are being asked today. We seek to publish work from a diverse range of authors, and stand for anti-racism, anti-colonialism and against discrimination in all forms.

  • General Editors: Kate Flint, University of Southern California, Clare Pettitt, University of Cambridge
  • Editorial Boards: Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London, Ali Behdad, University of California, Los Angeles, Alison Chapman, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck, University of London, Josephine McDonagh, University of Chicago, Elizabeth Miller, University of California, Davis, Cannon Schmitt, University of Toronto, Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge, Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia, Mark Turner, King’s College London

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117 results in Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Page 1 of 6

Railway Infrastructure and the Victorian Novel
  • From Platform to Plot via the Railroad
  • Nicola Kirkby
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • From 1830 onwards, railway infrastructure and novel infrastructure worked together to set nineteenth-century British society moving in new directions. At the same time, they introduced new periods of relative stasis into everyday life – whether waiting for a train or for the next instalment of a serial – that were keenly felt. Here, Nicola Kirkby maps out the plot mechanisms that drive canonical nineteenth-century fiction by authors including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and E. M. Forster. Her cross-disciplinary approach, as enjoyable to follow as it is thorough, draws logistical challenges of multiplot, serial, and collaborative fiction into dialogue with large-scale public infrastructure. If stations, termini, tracks and tunnels reshaped the way that people moved and met both on and off the rails in the nineteenth century, Kirkby asks, then what new mechanisms did these spaces of encounter, entanglement, and disconnection offer the novel?

Maritime Relations
  • Life, Labour and Literature at the Water's Edge, 1850–1914
  • Emily Cuming
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Detailing the lives of ordinary sailors, their families and the role of the sea in Britain's long nineteenth century, Maritime Relations presents a powerful literary history from below. It draws on archival memoirs and logbooks, children's fiction and social surveys, as well as the work of canonical writers such as Gaskell, Dickens, Conrad and Joyce. Maritime Relations highlights the workings of gender, the family, and emotions, with particular attention to the lives of women and girls. The result is an innovative reading of neglected kinship relations that spanned cities and oceans in the Victorian period and beyond. Working at the intersection of literary criticism, the blue humanities and life writing studies, Emily Cuming creatively redefines the relations between life, labour and literature at the waterly edge of the nineteenth century.

Undercover
  • Victorian Investigative Journalism in Fact and Fiction
  • Stephen Donovan, Matthew Rubery
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • The scandalous 1866 publication of 'A Night in a Workhouse' altered the course of press history. Victorian journalist James Greenwood's disconcerting exposé of spending a night in a casual ward while disguised as a vagrant launched an enormously popular genre of newspaper writing that would come to be known as undercover reporting. Inspired by the exploits of the 'Amateur Casual', imitators infiltrated restricted areas by adopting disguises of their own as beggars, migrants, homeless people, mental patients, street performers, and single mothers. Undercover traces the seismic consequences that the radical innovation of 'going undercover' had for Victorian media, literature, and culture. This revisionist history of a distinctly British tradition of investigative journalism reconstitutes the pioneering investigations that shaped the global development of undercover reporting, analyses the format's vicarious appeal to audiences anxious about their own precarity, and traces the impact that incognito investigations had on the Victorian era's leading novelists.

Vivisection and Late-Victorian Literary Culture
  • Asha Hornsby
  • Published online:
    30 January 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • The nineteenth-century antivivisection movement was supported by a striking number of poets, authors, and playwrights who attended meetings, signed petitions, contributed funds, and lent their pens to the cause. Yet live animal experimentation also permeated the Victorian imagination and shaped British literary culture in ways that the movement against it did not anticipate and could not entirely control. This is the first sustained literary-critical study of the topic. It traces responses to the practice through an extensive corpus of canonical, popular, and ephemeral texts including newspapers, scientific books, and government documents. Asha Hornsby sheds light on the complex entanglement of art and science at the fin-de-siècle and explores how the representational and aesthetic preoccupations opened up by vivisection debates often sat uneasily alongside a socio-political commitment to animal protection. Despite efforts to present writing and vivisecting as rivalrous activities, author and experimenter, pen and scalpel, often resembled each other.

Acoustics in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science
  • Listening at the Threshold
  • Melissa Dickson
  • Published online:
    13 December 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024
  • What did it mean to hear, for the first time, what George Eliot described as 'that roar which lies on the other side of silence'? Rapid developments in nineteenth-century acoustic science and communications technologies opened up new worlds beyond the limits of normal audibility for the Victorian public. Weaving together explorations of scientific developments with imaginative cultural, spiritual, and literary responses, this book sets out to explore the burgeoning field of acoustics in the nineteenth century and the new language, structure, and conceptual models it offered to broker the boundaries of the individual self. Ranging from Eliot's Middlemarch to Du Maurier's Trilby, and from Laënnec's work on the stethoscope to experiments on animal audition, inquiries into the unconscious, and spiritualist investigations of the hidden world of vibrations, it demonstrates the profound challenge to the boundaries of the human that was issued by new sound technologies in the Victorian period.

Evolutionary Aestheticism in Victorian Culture
  • Lindsay Wilhelm
  • Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
  • The Aesthetic Movement, a collection of artists, writers and thinkers who rejected traditional ideas of beauty as guided and judged by morals and utility and rallied under the banner of 'art for art's sake', are often associated with hedonism and purposelessness. However, as Lindsay Wilhelm shows, aestheticism may have been more closely related to nineteenth-century ideas of progress and scientific advancement than we think. This book illuminates an important intellectual alliance between aestheticism and evolutionism in late-nineteenth-century Britain, putting aesthetic writers such as Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater into dialogue with scientific thinkers such as Darwin and mathematician W. K. Clifford. Considering in particular how Aestheticism and scientific thinking converged on utopian ideas about beauty, Lindsay Wilhelm reveals how this evolutionary aestheticism crucially shaped Victorian debates about individual pleasure and social progress that continue to resonate today.

Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
  • Joseph McQueen
  • Published online:
    14 November 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • Simultaneously spiritual and material, liturgy incarnates unseen realities in concrete forms – bread, wine, water, the architectural arrangement of churches and temples. Nineteenth-century writers were fascinated with liturgy. In this book Joseph McQueen shows the ways in which Romantic and Victorian writers, from Wordsworth to Wilde, regardless of their own personal beliefs, made use of the power of the liturgy in their work. In modernity, according to recent theories of secularization, the natural opposes the supernatural, reason (or science) opposes faith, and the material opposes the spiritual. Yet many nineteenth-century writers are manifestly fascinated by how liturgy and ritual undo these typically modern divides in order to reinvest material reality with spiritual meaning, reimagine the human as malleable rather than mechanical, and enflesh otherwise abstract ethical commitments. McQueen upends the dominant view of this period as one of scepticism and secularisation, paving the way for surprising new avenues of research.

Temporal Forms and the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean
  • Writing British Heritage in Ancient Lands
  • Lindsey N. Chappell
  • Published online:
    09 November 2024
    Print publication:
    14 November 2024
  • The Mediterranean is ubiquitous in nineteenth-century British literature, but this study is the first to fully recover and explore the region's centrality to Romantic and Victorian constructions of the past, the present, and the shape of time itself. Placing regions central to the making of Western cultural heritage, such as Italy and Greece, into context with one another and with European imperialism, Lindsey N. Chappell traces the contours of what she terms 'heritage discourse' – narrative that constructs or challenges imperial identities by reshaping antiquity – across nineteenth-century British texts. Heritage discourse functions via time, and often in counterintuitive and paradoxical ways. If assertions of political, cultural, and eventually racial supremacy were the end of this discourse, then time was the means through which it could be deployed and resisted. Chappell shows how historical narratives intervened in geopolitics, how antiquarianism sparked scientific innovation, and how classical and biblical heritage shaped British imperialism.

The Art of Uncertainty
  • Probable Realism and the Victorian Novel
  • Daniel Williams
  • Published online:
    29 February 2024
    Print publication:
    07 March 2024
  • The Victorian novel developed unique forms of reasoning under uncertainty-of thinking, judging, and acting in the face of partial knowledge and unclear outcome. George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, and later Joseph Conrad drew on science, mathematics, philosophy, and the law to articulate a phenomenology of uncertainty against emergent models of prediction and decision-making. In imaginative explorations of unsure reasoning, hesitant judgment, and makeshift action, these novelists cultivated distinctive responses to uncertainty as intellectual concern and cultural disposition, participating in the knowledge work of an era shaped by numerical approaches to the future. Reading for uncertainty yields a rich account of the dynamics of thinking and acting, a fresh understanding of realism as a genre of the probable, and a vision of literary-critical judgment as provisional and open-ended. Daniel Williams spotlights the value of literary art in a present marked by models and technologies of prediction.

Biopolitics and Animal Species in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science
  • Matthew Rowlinson
  • Published online:
    11 January 2024
    Print publication:
    01 February 2024
  • Principles of species taxonomy were contested ground throughout the nineteenth century, including those governing the classification of humans. Matthew Rowlinson shows that taxonomy was a literary and cultural project as much as a scientific one. His investigation explores animal species in Romantic writers including Gilbert White and Keats, taxonomies in Victorian lyrics and the nonsense botanies and alphabets of Edward Lear, and species, race, and other forms of aggregated life in Darwin's writing, showing how the latter views these as shaped by unconscious agency. Engaging with theoretical debates at the intersection of animal studies and psychoanalysis, and covering a wide range of science writing, poetry, and prose fiction, this study shows the political and psychic stakes of questions about species identity and management. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies
  • Edited by Charles Martindale, Elizabeth Prettejohn, Lene Østermark-Johansen
  • Published online:
    14 November 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023
  • Walter Pater's significance for the institutionalization of English studies at British universities in the nineteenth century is often overlooked. Addressing the importance of his volume Appreciations (1889) in placing English literature in both a national and an international context, this book demonstrates the indebtedness of the English essay to the French tradition and brings together the classic, the Romantic, the English and the European. With essays on drama, prose, and poetry, from Shakespeare and Browne, to Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Pater's contemporaries Rossetti and Morris, Appreciations exemplifies ideals of aesthetic criticism formulated in Pater's first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Subjectivity pervades Pater's essays on the English authors, while bringing out their exceptional qualities in a manner reaching far into twentieth-century criticism. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel
  • Extreme Measures
  • Aaron Rosenberg
  • Published online:
    26 October 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023
  • At the turn of the twentieth century, novelists faced an unprecedented crisis of scale. While exponential increases in industrial production, resource extraction, and technological complexity accelerated daily life, growing concerns about deep time, evolution, globalization, and extinction destabilised scale's value as a measure of reality. Here, Aaron Rosenberg examines how four novelists moved radically beyond novelistic realism, repurposing the genres-romance, melodrama, gothic, and epic-it had ostensibly superseded. He demonstrates how H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf engaged with climatic and ecological crises that persist today, requiring us to navigate multiple temporal and spatial scales simultaneously. The volume shows that problems of scale constrain our responses to crisis by shaping the linguistic, aesthetic, and narrative structures through which we imagine it. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
  • Lauren Gillingham
  • Published online:
    11 May 2023
    Print publication:
    25 May 2023
  • Revealing how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representation of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain, Lauren Gillingham offers a revisionist history of the novel. With particular attention to the fiction of the 1820s through 1840s, this study focuses on novels that use fashion's idiom of currency and obsolescence to link narrative form to a heightened sense of the present and the visibility of public life. It contends that novelists steeped their fiction in date-stamped matters of dress, manners, and media sensations to articulate a sense of history as unfolding not in epochal change, but in transient issues and interests capturing the public's imagination. Reading fiction by Mary Shelley, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others, Fashionable Fictions tells the story of a nineteenth-century genre commitment to contemporaneity that restyles the novel itself.

The Art of the Reprint
  • Nineteenth-Century Novels in Twentieth-Century Editions
  • Rosalind Parry
  • Published online:
    23 March 2023
    Print publication:
    30 March 2023
  • A genuinely original work, The Art of the Reprint establishes the reprint as a vital area of study. In tightly curated encounters between extraordinary twentieth-century artists and beloved nineteenth-century novels, Clare Leighton travels to Dorset to minutely observe Thomas Hardy's landscape for a 1929 The Return of the Native (1878); Rockwell Kent channels his many sea journeys into a 1930 Moby Dick (1851); Fritz Eichenberg transposes the churn and isolation of fleeing Nazi Germany onto Expressionistic engravings for Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847); and Joan Hassall elucidates a bright social world at miniature scale for a 1975 set of The Complete Novels of Jane Austen (1787-1817). Mediators between text and book and author and reader, these artists interpreted these novels and then illustrated their interpretations, stunningly and strangely, in wood, ink, and paper, for everyday readers.

Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence
  • Sarah Green
  • Published online:
    02 March 2023
    Print publication:
    09 March 2023
  • Can sexual restraint be good for you? Many Victorians thought so. This book explores the surprisingly positive construction of sexual restraint in an unlikely place: late nineteenth-century Decadence. Reading Decadent texts alongside Victorian writing about sexual health, including medical literature, adverts, advice books, and periodical articles, it identifies an intellectual Paterian tradition of sensuous continence, in which 'healthy' pleasure is distinguished from its 'harmful' counterpart. Recent work on Decadent sexuality concentrates on transgression and subversion, with restraint interpreted ahistorically as evidence of repression/sublimation or queer coding. Here Sarah Green examines the work of Walter Pater, Lionel Johnson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore to outline a co-extensive alternative approach to sexuality where restraint figured as a productive part of the 'aesthetic life', or a practical ethics shaped by aesthetic principles. Attending to this tradition reveals neglected connections within and beyond Decadence, bringing fresh perspective to its late nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception.

Birdsong, Speech and Poetry
  • The Art of Composition in the Long Nineteenth Century
  • Francesca Mackenney
  • Published online:
    15 September 2022
    Print publication:
    22 September 2022
  • In the long nineteenth century, scientists discovered striking similarities between how birds learn to sing and how children learn to speak. Tracing the 'science of birdsong' as it developed from the 'ingenious' experiments of Daines Barrington to the evolutionary arguments of Charles Darwin, Francesca Mackenney reveals a legacy of thought which informs, and consequently affords fresh insights into, a canonical group of poems about birdsong in the Romantic and Victorian periods. With a particular focus on the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Wordsworth siblings, John Clare and Thomas Hardy, her book explores how poets responded to an analogy which challenged definitions of language and therefore of what it means to be human. Drawing together responses to birdsong in science, music and poetry, her distinctive interdisciplinary approach challenges many of the long-standing cultural assumptions which have shaped (and continue to shape) how we respond to other creatures in the Anthropocene.

Conversing in Verse
  • Conversation in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry
  • Elizabeth Helsinger
  • Published online:
    21 July 2022
    Print publication:
    04 August 2022
  • Conversing in Verse considers poems of conversation from the late eighteenth into the twentieth centuries – the very period when a more restrictive conception of poetry as the lyric product of the poet's solitary self-communing became entrenched. With fresh insight, Elizabeth Helsinger addresses a range of questions at the core of conversational poetry: When and why do poets turn to conversation to explore poetry's potential? How do conversation's forms and intentions shape the figures, rhythms, and prosody of poems to alter the reader's experience? What are the ethical and political stakes of conversing in verse? Coleridge, Clare, Landor, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne, Michael Field, and Hardy each composed poems that open difficult or impossible conversations with phenomena outside themselves. Helsinger unearths an unfamiliar lyric history that produced some of the most interesting formal experiments of the nineteenth century, including its best known, the dramatic monologue.

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany
  • Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity
  • Linda Hughes
  • Published online:
    02 June 2022
    Print publication:
    09 June 2022
  • Shedding new light on the alternative, emancipatory Germany discovered and written about by progressive women writers during the long nineteenth century, this illuminating study uncovers a country that offered a degree of freedom and intellectual agency unheard of in England. Opening with the striking account of Anna Jameson and her friendship with Ottilie von Goethe, Linda K. Hughes shows how cultural differences spurred ten writers' advocacy of progressive ideas and provided fresh materials for publishing careers. Alongside well-known writers – Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Michael Field, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Vernon Lee – this study sheds light on the lesser-known writers Mary and Anna Mary Howitt, Jessie Fothergill, and the important Anglo-Jewish lesbian writer Amy Levy. Armed with their knowledge of the German language, each of these women championed an extraordinarily productive openness to cultural exchange and, by approaching Germany through a female lens, imported an alternative, 'other' Germany into English letters.

Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle
  • Fraser Riddell
  • Published online:
    15 April 2022
    Print publication:
    14 April 2022
  • Drawing on an ambitious range of interdisciplinary material, including literature, musical treatises and theoretical texts, Music and the Queer Body explores the central place music held for emergent queer identities in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Canonical writers such as Walter Pater, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf are discussed alongside lesser-known figures such as John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee and Arthur Symons. Engaging with a number of historical case studies, Fraser Riddell pays particular attention to the significance of embodiment in queer musical subcultures and draws on contemporary queer theory and phenomenology to show how writers associate music with shameful, masochistic and anti-humanist subject positions. Ultimately, this study reveals how literary texts at the fin de siècle invest music with queer agency: to challenge or refuse essentialist identities, to facilitate re-conceptions of embodied subjectivity, and to present alternative sensory experiences of space and time. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century
  • Sympathetic Partnerships and Artistic Creation
  • Heather Bozant Witcher
  • Published online:
    12 March 2022
    Print publication:
    17 March 2022
  • Bringing the collaborative process to life through an array of examples, Heather Witcher shows that sympathetic co-creation is far more than the mere act of writing together. While foregrounding the material aspects of collaboration – hands uniting on the page, blank space left for fellow contributors, the writing and exchanging of drafts – this study also illuminates its social aspects and its reliance on Victorian liberalism: dialogue, the circulation of correspondence, the lived experience of collaboration, and, on a less material plane, transhistorical collaborations with figures of the past. Witcher takes a broad approach to these partnerships and, in doing so, challenges traditional expectations surrounding the nature of authorship itself, not least its typical classification as a solitary activity. Within this new framework, collaboration enables the titles of 'coauthor,' 'influencer,' 'editor,' 'critic,' and 'inspiration' to coexist. This book celebrates the plurality of collaboration and underscores the truly social nature of nineteenth-century writing.

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