George Du Maurier

Dennis Denisoff

First published in 1894, the story of the diva Trilby O'Ferrall and her mesmeric mentor, Svengali, has entered the mythology of the time alongside Dracula and Sherlock Holmes. Immensely popular on publication, the novel led to a hit play, a series of popular films, and the trilby hat. The setting of the story reflects the author's bohemian years as an art student in Paris; indeed James McNeill Whistler was to recognize himself in one of the early serialized instalments. George du Maurier was a celebrated caricaturist for Punch magazine and his drawings for the novel form part of its appeal - this edition includes his most significant illustrations as well as a fine critical introduction and extensive notes.

Trilby

This diverse collection addresses not only the roles assigned to children in the context of nineteenth-century consumer culture, but also children themselves as agents in the formation of that culture. Topics include child performers on the Victorian stag

The Nineteenth-century Child and Consumer Culture

Decadent Ecology illuminates the networks of nature, paganism, and desire in 19th- and early 20th-century decadent literature and art. Combining the environmental humanities with aesthetic, queer and literary theory, this study reveals the interplay of art, eco-paganism and science during the formation of modern ecological and evolutionary thought.

Decay, Desire, and the Pagan Revival

Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910

Dog Years

Arthur Machen has finally been recognized as a key contributor to the glittering age of British Decadence. Best known for the novella The Great God Pan and for his formative influence on weird fiction, in fact much of Machen’s writing profoundly challenges literary and cultural convention. From the demonic horror of “The Recluse of Bayswater” to the plush occultism of The Hill of Dreams and the prose poems of Ornaments in Jade, this selection of works from throughout Machen’s career brings to life his unique symbolist aesthetics and spiritual philosophy. This is the first edition of Machen’s work to foreground his Decadent and occult writing. It includes a scholarly introduction, extensive annotations, and revealing contextual materials. Engaging with the gems of Machen’s oeuvre, the collection invites readers to open their minds to a reality beyond the veil, the reality – in Machen’s view – that matters most.

Decadent and Occult Works by Arthur Machen

Talia Schaffer

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature

During the rise of consumer culture in the nineteenth century, children and childhood were called on to fulfill a range of important roles. In addition to being consumers themselves, the young functioned as both 'goods' to be used and consumed by adults and as proof that middle-class materialist ventures were assisting in the formation of a more ethical society. Children also provided necessary labor and raw material for industry. This diverse collection addresses the roles assigned to children in the context of nineteenth-century consumer culture, at the same time that it remains steadfast in recognizing that the young did not simply exist within adult-articulated cultural contexts but were agents in their formation. Topics include toys and middle-class childhood; boyhood and toy theater; child performers on the Victorian stage; gender, sexuality and consumerism; imperialism in adventure fiction; the idealization of childhood as a form of adult entertainment and self-flattery; the commercialization of orphans; and the economics behind formulations of child poverty. Together, the essays demonstrate the rising investment both children and adults made in commodities as sources of identity and human worth.

The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture

The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories beautifully demonstrates the astonishing variety and ingenuity of Victorian short stories. This collection brings together works focused on a wide range of popular Victorian subjects in many different styles and forms (including comic, gothic, fantasy, adventure, and colonial works; science fiction; children’s tales; New Woman writing; Irish yarns; stories originally published in popular periodicals; and travel stories). Both well-known and lesser-known authors are included, and both men and women are well represented. This anthology includes twenty-six annotated stories, a general introduction that discusses the history of the genre’s development in relation to key socio-political issues of the Victorian era, and suggestions for secondary readings. It also includes an intriguing selection of Victorian writings on the genre by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, Frederick Wedmore, and Laura Marholm Hansson.

The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories

This 2001 book studies the concept of parody as a strategy used by sexually marginalized groups.

Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840-1940

Matthew Potolsky

Liz Constable

When Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency in 1895, a reporter for the National Observer wrote that there was "not a man or a woman in the English-speaking world possessed of the treasure of a wholesome mind who is not under a deep debt of gratitude to the marquis of Queensberry for destroying the high Priest of the Decadents." But reports of the death of decadence were greatly exaggerated, and today, more than one hundred years after the famous trial and at the beginning of a new millennium, the phenomenon of decadence continues to be a significant cultural force. Indeed, "decadence" in the nineteenth century, and in our own period, has been a concept whose analysis yields a broad set of associations. In Perennial Decay, Emily Apter, Charles Bernheimer, Sylvia Molloy, Michael Riffaterre, Barbara Spackman, Marc Weiner, and others extend the critical field of decadence beyond the traditional themes of morbidity, the cult of artificiality, exoticism, and sexual nonconformism. They approach the question of decadence afresh, reevaluating the continuing importance of late nineteenth-century decadence for contemporary literary and cultural studies.

Dennis Denisoff

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