Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition Series

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.

Introduction. 'Knowledge made for cutting' Penny Fielding and Andrew Taylor; 1. Mermaids amongst the cables: the abstracted body and the telegraphic touch in the nineteenth century Clare Pettitt; 2. Enclosing forms, opening spaces: the 1880s fixed-verse revival Linda K. Hughes; 3. 'The Newest Culte': Victorian poetry and the literary societies of the 1880s Angela Dunstan; 4. The time of W. E. Henley: 'minor poetry' and the 1880s Penny Fielding; 5. The evolution of point of view Cannon Schmitt; 6. Network, history, method: Andrew Lang in and after the 1880s Nathan K. Hensley; 7. Animated conversations: form, transformation, and the category of the novel in the 1880s Barbara Leckie; 8. Henry James, vulgarity, and the contexts of transatlantic moderation Andrew Taylor; 9. He and She: the 1880s, camp aesthetics and the literary magazine Sara Lodge; 10. Men, women and horses: public spectacle in 1887 John Stokes; 11. The secular turn in British literature of the 1880s William Greenslade; Index.

Penny Fielding is Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain 1760–1830 (Cambridge, 2008) and many books and articles on the long nineteenth century as well as a General Editor of the New Edinburgh Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Andrew Taylor is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Henry James and the Father Question (Cambridge, 2002) as well as other publications on nineteenth-century transatlantic literary culture.