The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century

Reassessing the Tradition

Francis O'Gorman, Katherine Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138263611
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351880602
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Disrupting the common assumption that the Victorians regarded their eighteenth-century predecessors with little interest or with disdain, the essays in The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century propose a re-examination of these relationships. Together, they expose some of the significant and complex ways in which key aspects and texts of the eighteenth century were situated, read, and transacted within the post-Romantic nineteenth century. Individual essays examine the influence of the work of Pope and the eighteenth-century novelists such as Johnson, Chatterton, and Rousseau on a range of Victorian writers and cultural productions, including Dickens, Eliot, Oliphant, Ruskin, historical fiction, late Victorian art criticism, The English Men of Letters series, and the Oxford English Dictionary. The contributors challenge long-held views about Victorian uses of the past, and offer new insights into how the literature and culture of the eighteenth century helped shape the culture and identity of the nineteenth. This collection of essays by an impressive array of scholars, with a Preface by David Fairer, represents a unique approach to this area of literary history and offers new perspectives on the nature and methodology of 'periodization'. While it is obviously of great interest to students of eighteenth-century and Victorian literature, it will also appeal to readers more broadly concerned with questions of literary influence, periodization, and historiography.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Debt to Society: Dickens, Fielding, and the Genealogy of Independence
• 2 George Eliot, Rousseau, and the Discipline of Natural Consequences
• 3 ‘The Dreams of thy Youth’: Bucks, Belles and Half-way Men in Victorian Fiction
• 4 The ‘High Priest of an Age of Prose and Reason’? Alexander Pope and the Victorians
• 5 The Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-century Representation in Victorian Literary Histories
• 6 The ‘Link of Transition’: Samuel Johnson and the Victorians
• 7 Departures and Returns: Writing the English Dictionary in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• 8 Ruskin’s Revised Eighteenth Century
• 9 Sincerity in Every Department? Masks, Masculinity, and Market Forces in Eighteenth-century English Men of Letters
• 10 ‘I am Nothing’: A Typology of the Forger from Chatterton to Wilde
• 11 Regarding the Eighteenth Century: Vernon Lee and Emilia Dilke Construct a Period
• Selected Bibliography
• Index