Focusing on the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Albert D. Pionke's book historicizes the relationship of ritual, class, and public status in Victorian England. His analysis of various discourses related to professionalization suggests that public ritual flourished during the period, especially among the burgeoning ranks of Victorian professions. As Pionke shows, magazines, court cases, law books, manuals, and works by authors that include William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Hughe...

Designed for both first-time teachers of survey courses in later British literature and more experienced instructors seeking a new way to approach familiar material, ''Teaching Later British Literature' seeks to recapture the interconnectedness within and among Romantic, Victorian and Modern literature. Focusing on some of the defining historical, intellectual and artistic preoccupations that individual works explore in common with their literary peers, the book also invites teachers to he...

There are few more intimidating moments in an English teacher’s career than those in which they learn that they have been assigned ‘the survey’ for the first time. Distilling scores of years of literary history and thousands of pages of literary texts into a coherent semester can seem impossible at first. Add to this the fact that few teachers at the high school level receive in-depth instruction in literary history, whereas their counterparts at the college and university levels receive l...

There are few more intimidating moments in an English teacher’s career than those in which they learn that they have been assigned ‘the survey’ for the first time. Distilling scores of years of literary history and thousands of pages of literary texts into a coherent semester can seem impossible at first. Add to this the fact that few teachers at the high school level receive in-depth instruction in literary history, whereas their counterparts at the college and university levels receive l...

That Thomas Carlyle was influential in his own lifetime and continues to be so over 130 years after his death is a proposition with which few will disagree. His role as his generation’s foremost interpreter of German thought, his distinctive rhetorical style, his approach to history via the “innumerable biographies” of great men, and his almost unparalleled record of correspondence with contemporaries both great and small, makes him a necessary figure of study in multiple fields.Th...

At once an invitation and a provocation, The Socio-Literary Imaginary represents the first collection of essays to illuminate the historically and intellectually complex relationship between literary studies and sociology in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. During the ongoing emergence of what Thomas Carlyle, in "Signs of the Times" (1829), pejoratively labeled a new "Mechanical Age," Britain’s robust tradition of social thought was transformed by professionalizatio...

Whether commercial, personal, political, professional, or spiritual, knowledge was capital for the Victorians in their ongoing project of constructing a modern information-based society. Victorian Secrecy explores the myriad ways in which knowledge was both zealously accumulated and jealously guarded by individuals, institutions, and government entities in Victorian Britain. Offering a wide variety of critical approaches and disciplinary perspectives, the contributors examine secretive act...