An accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the era, this companion explores influential dramatic works by Ibsen, Shaw and Wilde; the poetry of mourning; novelistic genres, including social problem novels and sensation fiction; and the literature of the fin de siècle's aesthetes and decadents. Cultural and historical debates - focussing on empire, national identity, science and evolution, print culture and gender - supply essential context alongside discussion of relevant critical theory.
Part One - Introduction
Part Two - A Cultural Overview
Part Three - Texts, Writers and Contexts
Victorian Poetry - Memory and Mourning: The Brownings, Swinburne and Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Extended commentary: Tennyson, In Memoriam
The Social Problem Novel: Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley and Elizabeth Gaskell
Extended Commentary: Gaskell, North and South (1855)
The Provincial or Regional Novel: Anthony Trollope, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy
Extended Commentary: Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd
Sensation Fiction: Wilkie Collins, Ellen Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Extended Commentary: Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (1862)
Victorian Drama: Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw
Extended Commentary: Shaw, Mrs Warren's Profession (1893)
Aesthetes and Decadents: Walter Pater, Arthur Symonds, J. K. Huysmans and Oscar Wilde
Extended Commentary: Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
Part Four: Critical theories and Debates
Reader Reception and the popular author
New women, New Readers
The Literature of Empire and National Identity
Science, Eugenics and Evolution
Part Five - References and resources
Timeline
Further reading
Index
