Philip Davis

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is a passionate defense of Victorian literature’s enduring impact and importance for readers interested in the relationship between literature and life, reading and thinking. Explores the prominence of Victorian literature for contemporary readers and academics, through the author’s unique insight into why it is still important todayProvides new frames of interpretation for key Victorian works of literature and close readings of important textsArgues for a new engagement with Victorian literature, from general readers and scholars alikeSeeks to remove Victorian literature from an entrenched set of values, traditions and perspectives - demonstrating how vital and resonant it is for modern literary and cultural analysis

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is a passionate defense of Victorian literature’s enduring impact and importance for readers interested in the relationship between literature and life, reading and thinking. Explores the prominence of Victorian literature for contemporary readers and academics, through the author’s unique insight into why it is still important todayProvides new frames of interpretation for key Victorian works of literature and close readings of important textsArgues for a new engagement with Victorian literature, from general readers and scholars alikeSeeks to remove Victorian literature from an entrenched set of values, traditions and perspectives - demonstrating how vital and resonant it is for modern literary and cultural analysis

Inaugurating a major new series, successor to the Oxford History of English Literature but excitingly new in its emphasis on 'literary history', this volume covers the flowering of Victorian literature, from the decade when Tennyson started writing In Memoriam and Darwin embarked on the Beagle to the publication of Hardy's first great novels and the death of George Eliot. The Victorian era produced a literature of diversity and experimentation, engaged with powerful controversies and heartfelt arguments that lie at the centre of the formation of the modern world. It has often been misrepresented, either as an age of dull and rigid certainty or one of anxious and depressive morbidity, but what distinguishes the writing of the period - from its origins in the 1830s to its crisis point around 1880 - is its power of serious inquiry. It poses questions about the relation between society and the individual, the rival claims of market and morality, the form and function of democracy, and, above all, the existence or non-existence of God and the purposes of human life. Such concerns make this a time in which literature has a new urgency and vitality, and lies close to the heart of a culminating crisis of the Western conscience. The series will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all keen readers of English fiction.

Heralding a new era in literary studies, the Oxford English Literary History breaks the mould of traditional approaches to the canon by focusing on the contexts in which the authors wrote and how their work was shaped by the times in which they lived. Each volume offers a fresh, ground-breaking re-assessment of the authors, their works, and the events and ideas which shaped the literary voice of their age. Written by some of the leading scholars in the field, under the general-editorship of Jonathan Bate, the Oxford English Literary History is essential reading for everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English literature. This volume covers the flowering of Victorian literature, from the decade when Tennyson started writing In Memoriam and Darwin embarked on the Beagle to the publication of Hardy's first great novels and the death of George Eliot. The Victorian era produced a literature of diversity and experimentation, engaged with powerful controversies and heartfelt arguments that lie at the centre of the formation of the modern world. It has often been misrepresented, either as an age of dull and rigid certainty or one of anxious and depressive morbidity, but what distinguishes the writing of the period - from its origins in the 1830s to its crisis point around 1880 - is its power of serious inquiry. It poses questions about the relation between society and the individual, the rival claims of market and morality, the form and function of democracy, and, above all, the existence or non-existence of God and the purposes of human life. Such concerns make this a time in which literature has a new urgency and vitality, and lies close to the heart of a culminating crisis of the Western conscience. less tied to the canonical authors and much more interested in placing both canonical and non-canonical writings in their historical context. These are books that every serious student and scholar of the period will need on their shelves.

'His mind and hand went together' said Hemings and Condell of the speed of Shakespeare. But the conceptual language of literary criticism, be it moralistic or political, has long been too slow to the properly responsive to Shakespeare's meaning. With the help of both Renaissance philosophers and present-day actors, Sudden Shakepeare seeks to locate the underlying secrets of Shakespeare's dynamic power. It offers a technical language wihch, close to Shakespeare's own, is capable of responding suddenly to the speed, transforming shape, and power of Shakespeare's way of thinking as it comes into meaning.