Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s

Penny Fielding, Andrew Taylor

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781107181908
• eBook ISBN: 9781316859599
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What does it mean to focus on the decade as a unit of literary history? Emerging from the shadows of iconic Victorian authors such as Eliot and Tennyson, the 1880s is a decade that has been too readily overlooked in the rush to embrace end-of-century decadence and aestheticism. The 1880s witnessed new developments in transatlantic networks, experiments in lyric poetry, the decline of the three-volume novel, and the revaluation of authors, journalists and the reading public. The contributors to this collection explore the case for the 1880s as both a discrete point of literary production, with its own pressures and provocations, and as part of literature's sense of its expanded temporal and geographical reach. The essays address a wide variety of authors, topics and genres, offering incisive readings of the diverse forces at work in the shaping of the literary 1880s.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: ‘Knowledge Made for Cutting’
• Chapter 1 Mermaids Amongst the Cables: The Abstracted Body and the Telegraphic Touch in the Nineteenth Century
• Chapter 2 Enclosing Forms, Opening Spaces: The 1880s Fixed-Verse Revival
• Chapter 3 ‘The Newest Culte’: Victorian Poetry and the Literary Societies of the 1880s
• Chapter 4 The Time of W. E. Henley: ‘Minor Poetry’ and the 1880s
• Chapter 5 The Evolution of Point of View
• Chapter 6 Network, History, Method: Andrew Lang in and after the 1880s
• Chapter 7 Animated Conversations: Form, Transformation and the Category of the Novel in the 1880s
• Chapter 8 Henry James, Vulgarity and Transatlantic Moderation
• Chapter 9 He and She: The 1880s, Camp Aesthetics and the Literary Magazine
• Chapter 10 Men, Women and Horses: Public Spectacle in 1887
• Chapter 11 The Secular Turn in British Literature of the 1880s
• Index