This inspiring survey challenges conventional ways of viewing the Victorian novel.
- Provides time maps and overviews of historical and social contexts.
- Considers the relationship between the Victorian novel and historical, religious and bibliographic writing.
- Features short biographies of over forty Victorian authors, including Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
- Offers close readings of over 30 key texts, among them Charlotte Brontë s Jane Eyre (1847) and Bram Stoker s Dracula (1897), as well as key presences, such as John Bunyan s Pilgrim s Progress (Pt 1, 1676, Pt 2, 1684).
- Also covers topics such as colonialism, scientific speculation, the psychic and the supernatural, and working class reading.