Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature
Feminist Gothic: Ghost Stories by Victorian Women Writers
1st Edition
By Anne DeLong
December 17, 2025
This examination of 32 ghost stories by 21 Victorian women writers defines a new genre, Feminist Gothic, that utilizes the Gothic structure and its uncanny atmosphere of ambiguity to deploy competing narratives that seek to undermine patriarchy by simultaneously upholding and subverting its ...
Robert Browning and the Gothic Imagination
1st Edition
By Justin Gilbert
December 02, 2025
The poetry of Robert Browning (1812–89) makes unmistakable use of the tropes of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel, but only in the last few years has there been any interest in the poet’s wider relationship with the genre. Building on recent critical literature, Robert Browning and the Gothic ...
Margaret Oliphant’s Curative Gothic Literature
1st Edition
By Katerina García-Walsh
November 05, 2025
Prolific Scottish novelist Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897), remembered chiefly for her realist fiction and biting literary criticism of contemporary authors, also wrote nineteen supernatural tales. This monograph offers a comprehensive exploration of Oliphant’s Gothic literature, in the light of her ...
The Ambivalent Detective in Victorian Sensation Novels: Dickens, Braddon, and Collins
1st Edition
By Sarah Yoon
October 26, 2025
The Ambivalent Detective in Victorian Sensation Novels studies how the detective as a literary character evolved through the mid-nineteenth century in England, as seen in sensation novels. In contrast to most assumptions about the English detective, Yoon argues that the detective was more often ...
Beyond the Shelley Circle: The Clairmont Family and Its Descendants
1st Edition
By Sharon L. Joffe
July 24, 2025
Beyond the Shelley Circle: The Clairmont Family and Its Descendants will interest Shelley-circle researchers, life-writing scholars, and nineteenth-century historians alike. The Clairmont family’s connection to Mary Shelley began in 1801, when her father William Godwin married Mary Jane Vial. The ...
Doctrine and Difference: The Thematic Scale of Classic American Literature
1st Edition
By Michael J. Colacurcio
May 05, 2025
Doctrine and Difference: The Thematic Scale of Classic American Literature aims to expand and deepen our knowledge into the inquiry of “contextual historicism,” observing writers of the American nineteenth century, and their vastly differing approaches to perceptions such as race, gender, and ...
Oscar Wilde and Nihilism
1st Edition
By Colin Cavendish-Jones
March 13, 2025
Oscar Wilde and Nihilism examines Wilde’s major works in the context of nineteenth-century philosophical nihilism and the Victorian religious unsettlement. The book covers Wilde’s plays, the fairy tales, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the critical writings, and De Profundis to show how Wilde’s ...
Strangers and the Enchantment of Space in Victorian Fiction, 1830–1865
1st Edition
By Kristen Pond
January 30, 2025
Tracing the origins of how we think about strangers to the Victorian period, Strangers and the Enchantment of Space in Victorian Fiction, 1830– 1865 explores the vital role strangers had in shaping social relations during the cultural transformations of the Industrial Revolution, transportation ...
Liberalism, Theology, and the Performative in Antebellum American Literature
1st Edition
By Patrick McDonald
December 18, 2024
The 1850s United States witnessed a far-reaching political, social, and economic crisis. Symptomatic of this, a wide range of narrative fiction from sentimental novels to sensational drama identifies a foundational link between liberal institutions and performative utterances. Auctions, trials, ...
Keats and Scepticism
1st Edition
By Li Ou
November 28, 2024
Keats and Scepticism explores Keats’s affinity with the philosophical tradition of scepticism and reads Keats’s poetry anew in the light of this affinity. It suggests Keats’s links with the origin of scepticism in ancient Greece as recorded in Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Scepticism. It also ...
Prepossessing Henry James: The Strange Freedom
1st Edition
By Julián Jiménez Heffernan
November 28, 2024
The novels of Henry James are filled with ghosts, but most of them escape dramatic treatment. These elusive specters are the voices of precursors that haunt his narratives, compromising their constitutive freedom. The Strange Freedom is an examination of the ways James’s fiction is prepossessed by ...
Domesticity and Design in American Women's Lives and Literature: Stowe, Alcott, Cather, and Wharton Writing Home
1st Edition
By Caroline Hellman
October 14, 2024
Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature explores the ways in which four American women writers from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century inhabited domestic space and portrayed it in their work. Hellman explores independent female authors who had intriguing and ...