Dickens to Hardy 1837-1884

An authoritative survey of Victorian fiction which explores the relationship between national identity, cultural memory and narratives of the past in major Victorian novels.

Dickens to Hardy, 1837-1884 charts the transitions of particular Victorian literary and cultural concerns across nearly fifty years of the Nineteenth century. With each chapter focusing on readings of particular novels, Julian Wolfreys questions how the Victorian middle classes identified themselves in their modernity and discusses how literature mediated the construction of identities through notions of cultural memory. Additionally, two chapters focus on particular genres, the gothic and the political, in the novel tradition of the Nineteenth century.

JULIAN WOLFREYS is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University, UK. He was previously Professor in Literature at the University of Florida, USA.

General Editor’s Preface * Abbreviations and Chronological List of Publications * Introduction * PART I: CULTURAL MEMORY * ‘The same story…with a difference’: The Pickwick Papers (1836-7) * ‘Our Society’: Cranford (1853) * PART II: QUESTIONS OF ENGLISHNESS: BEING & HISTORICITY * ‘The English mind’: The Moonstone (1868) * ‘Minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions’: Middlemarch (1871-72) * PART III: THE NEXT GENERATION * ‘The modern flower in a medieval flowerpot’: The example of Thomas Hardy * Chronology * Annotated Bibliography * Works Cited * Index