The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1830‐1918

Joanna Shattock, in her Introduction, rightly says that it was impossible to devote chapters in this Companion to the numerous individual writers and movements of the period. Instead, 15 essays by various academic authors “offer fresh perspectives” on Victorian literature from its origins at the end of the Romantic period to its aftermath in the early years of the twentieth century. These perspectives are arranged in three groups: “Modes of writing and their contexts”; “Intersections and incursions” (science, body and mind, religion, and visual culture); and “The centre and the periphery” (writing and attitudes associated with Empire and with transatlantic...