19th century literature reflects modern life.

Poetics, 2013

External factors such as author gender, author nationality, and date of publication affect both the choice of literary themes in novels and the expression of those themes, but the extent of this association is difficult to quantify. In this work, we apply statistical methods to identify and extract hundreds of "topics" from a corpus of 3,346 works of 19th-century British, Irish, and American fiction. We use these topics as a measurable, data-driven proxy for literary themes. External factors may predict fluctuations in the use of themes and the individual word choices within themes. We use topics to measure the evidence for these associations and whether that evidence is statistically significant. 1 Introduction:

The Year's Work in English Studies, 2012

This chapter has five sections: 1. Cultural Studies and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Drama; 5. Periodicals and Publishing History. Sections 1 and 2 are by William Baker; section 3 is by Gregory Tate and Martin Dubois; section 4 is by Alexis Easley; section 5 is by David Finkelstein.

Cambridge History of Victorian Literature, 2012

This history of Victorian literature’s role in twentieth- and twenty-first century popular culture and academic discourse culminates with a discussion of three ways that steampunk and neo-Victorian fiction differ from postmodernism.

2016

In his work Why Read? Mark Edmundson observes that “[w]e read to assert ourselves, to sharpen our analytical faculties. We read to debunk the myths. We read to know the other (...)” (52). While the reading process does not offer the “final” or “ultimate” truth, it encourages critical reflection both on the past and the present. In my paper I strive to answer the question: what does it mean to read Neo-Victorian fiction and what does this act signify for the present and for the modern reader? Consequently, I strive to define neo-Victorian fiction. While adopting Louisa Hadley’s notion of ventriloquism, I interpret neo-Victorian texts as literary mediums set in the nineteenth-century past, yet also consciously narrating the present. Furthermore, based on L. Hadley’s, A. Heilmann’s and M. Llewelyn’s works, I analyse the idea of the historical involvement of neo-Victorian fiction against the notions of parody and pastiche. Moreover, I discuss the process of reviving the popular nineteen...

A Companion to British Literature, 2014

Unlike the preceding three volumes in this Companion to British Literature-the Medieval, Early Modern, and Long Eighteenth Century-the current one attempts to cover at least two distinct periods: the Victorian and the Twentieth Century. To make matters more difficult, the second of these hardly counts as a single period; it is less an epoch than a placeholder. In terms of periodization, the Victorian era is succeeded-or some might say, overthrown-by the Modern. But modernism is not capacious enough to encompass the various kinds of literary art that emerged in Britain following World War II, the postmodern and the postcolonial, for example. We could follow the lead of recent scholars and expand the modernist period beyond the "high" to include the "late" and arguably the "post" as well. But this conceptual as well as temporal expansion does not take in the vital British literature written from the 1970s onward, an historical era distinct from the "postwar" that critics refer to, for now, as the "contemporary" (see English 2006). Of course, all periods are designated after they have finished, including the Victorian, which was very much a modernist creation. Yet it is unlikely we will come to call the period stretching from the middle of the last century to the early decades of the new millennium, from the breakup of Britain's empire to the devolution of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, "Elizabethan." And this despite the Victorian longevity of the Windsor monarch's reign. The queen is one and the same, but the national culture is anything but. It is difficult imagining the contemporary equivalent of Eminent Victorians (1918) emerging in the next few years. Who would the emblematic figures of this "period" be? The Beatles, Maggie Thatcher, Salman Rushdie, and David Beckham, perhaps? But this selection-or any selection, even a tendentious one like Strachey's-would probably not provide fodder for a cultural gestalt in the way that Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon did.

Neo-Victorian Studies, 2009

This collection of essays came out of a three-day interdisciplinary conference, 'Adapting the Nineteenth Century: Revisiting, Revising and Rewriting the Past', held at the University of Wales, Lampeter, in August 2008. The conference's resonance with the work being done by the Neo-Victorian Studies e-journal made the latter the obvious site to critically reflect on the event, not by producing a published conference proceedings, but rather by asking contributors to develop their presented papers in the light of the wide-ranging discussions at Lampeter on the multiple ways the nineteenth century is being recycled and deployed in present-day cultural discourses. In turning the spotlight on issues of the continuing fascination of the nineteenth century for contemporary readers, writers and academics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the conference's dual focus on the ideas of adaptation and the connections/discontinuities between the past and the present were key themes. In considering adaptation as it manifested itself in literature, media and culture more generally, rather than exclusively focusing on cross-media adaptations, the conference wished to acknowledge the notion of 'adaptation' in its broadest sense, as a phenomenon that extends to and permeates multiple arenas of contemporary life. 1 Thus the conference reflected on the intertextual and metatextual dialogues that exist between ostensibly distinct areas of society and cultural production, which continue to act as a process for the renewal of creative endeavours and generate new thinking about our relationship with the past, present and future.

Nineteenth …, 2009

In this paper, the main literary branches of Victorian literature, alongside the social, moral and political environment of this epoch will be explained. Throughout these pages, the needs of an era greatly affected by the arriving of the Industrial Revolution will be portrayed through the explanation of how the writers of the most influential literary genres of their time attempted to show their criticism towards the consequences of Industrialism, thus making a previous contextualization of this epoch imperative, so the reader may be able to picture the decadence of a period overcome by extreme poverty and an overwhelming working class prejudiced by an aristocratic minority, through the exemplification of the social and moral environment in works from writers like Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens. The main method conducted for the creation of this paper was the consultation of secondary and tertiary sources such as Internet articles and literary analysis from academics of Higher Education institutions. Throughout this research, it became evident that all three movements (Aestheticism, Realism and Romanticism) shared the common goal of functioning as counter-movements of the Industrial Revolution and of the consequences it brought to British society, therefore making the present analysis necessary to contextualize a period where technology, rational thought and social decadence became a rule.