Victorian Fiction Beyond the Canon

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction: Exploring the Hinterland of Victorian Fiction

   • Daragh Downes, Trish Ferguson

   Pages 1-15

3. Prize Novelists and Condensed Novels: Thackeray and Bret Harte

   • Michael Slater

   Pages 17-29

4. Before New Grub Street: Thomas Miller and the Contingencies of Authorship

   • Adam Abraham

   Pages 31-44

5. Emboldening the Weak: The Early Fiction of James Anthony Froude

   • Ciaran Brady

   Pages 45-70

6. George Borrow: The Scholar, The Gipsy, The Priest

   • Monika Mazurek

   Pages 71-86

7. Sensation Fiction as Social Activism: Charles Reade’s It Is Never Too Late to Mend and Felicia Skene’s Hidden Depths

   • Elizabeth Andrews

   Pages 87-103

8. Sheer Luck, Holmes? Clues Towards Canon Formation in Victorian Detective Fiction

   • Daragh Downes

   Pages 105-123

9. Politics of the Strange and Unusual: Mesmerism and the Medical Professional in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘Dr.Carrick’ (1878)

   • Samantha J. M. Aliu

   Pages 125-142

10. Silas K. Hocking, Her Benny, and the Poetics of the Prolific

    • Christopher Pittard

    Pages 143-161

11. Henry Hawley Smart’s The Great Tontine and the Art of Book-Making

    • Trish Ferguson

    Pages 163-179

12. Double Standards: Reading the Revolutionary Doppelgänger in The Prophet’s Mantle

    • Matthew Ingleby

    Pages 181-199

13. Richard Marsh and the Realist Gothic: Pursuing Traces of an Evasive Author in His Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction

    • Ailise Bulfin

    Pages 201-217

14. Dat Cura Commodum or A Portrait of a Deviant Mind: Arthur Griffiths’s The Rome Express, John Milne’s ‘The Express Series’ and Late-Victorian Detective Fiction

    • Paul Raphael Rooney

    Pages 219-237

15. Afterword from the Hinterland

    • John Sutherland

    Pages 239-247

16. Back Matter

    Pages 249-273

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This book is about selected Victorian texts and authors that in many cases have never before been subject to sustained scholarly attention. Taking inspiration from the pioneeringly capacious approach to the hidden hinterland of Victorian fiction adopted by scholars like John Sutherland and Franco Moretti, this energetically revisionist volume takes advantage of recent large-scale digitisation projects that allow unprecedented access to hitherto neglected literary texts and archives. Blending lively critical engagement with individual texts and close attention to often surprising trends in the production and reception of prose fiction across the Victorian era, this book will be of use to anyone interested in re-evaluating the received meta-narratives of Victorian literary history. With an afterword by John Sutherland

• John Sutherland
• Franco Moretti
• Meta-narrative
• Literary history
• Archive
• British and Irish Literature

“The essays in Victorian Fiction Beyond the Canon are consistently absorbing and, collectively, they make a strong and urgent case for the need to study the work of the other 99.5 percent.” (Grace Moore, Victorian Studies, Vol. 62 (1), 2019)

• School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

  Daragh Downes

• Department of English, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, United Kingdom

  Trish Ferguson

Trish Ferguson is Senior Lecturer in the English Department of Liverpool Hope University, UK. She is the author of Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions (2013) and the editor of Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).


Daragh Downes is a Teaching Fellow in English and German at Trinity College Dublin. His chief English research interest is Charles Dickens and his milieu.

 

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