While George MacDonald’s reputation as a fiction writer rests upon fantasy and Christianity more than realism, his realist novels reflect a remarkable generic range. MacDonald wrote twenty-nine realist novels between 1863 and 1897, most of them set in Scotland and England. Together, these novels share many overlapping themes and plot trajectories, and critics have objected to their formulaic characters (noble workmen, saintly women, dying children) and predictably happy endings. These shared features aside, the novels set in England also provide a micro-history of ‘the novel’ in the later Victorian age, incorporating elements of the social-problem novel and a concern for the urban poor; the sensation novel’s detective plot; and the gothic novel’s seeming supernaturalism, ultimately explained by nature. This chapter examines these subgenres as well as MacDonald’s sophisticated use of metafiction. While metafiction has been dominantly explored in modernism, MacDonald is one of many Victorian novelists whose self-conscious formal techniques draw attention to his experimental realism.

This chapter explores Elizabeth Bowen’s career as a literary critic, which is a significant but often overlooked aspect of her writing life. Focusing on her two published essay collections – Collected Impressions (1950) and Afterthought: Pieces about Writing (1962) – as well as a series of uncollected book reviews and articles that appeared in a wide range of British and American newspapers and journals, this chapter examines Bowen’s distinctive approach to criticism and traces the development of her public persona as a critic, particularly from the late 1940s onwards. While it is well documented that Bowen’s prodigious critical output was driven in part by financial necessity, her writing in this domain demonstrates a sensitivity to atmosphere and a deep interest in better understanding the craft of writing. A reviewer who kept the common reader in mind, Bowen above all else conveyed to her readers the sense of being a reasonable judge with varied taste. This chapter assesses Bowen’s enduring critical legacy and argues that her contributions to literary journalism merit sustained attention within the broader histories of twentieth-century criticism.

The chapter provides an overview situating the literatures produced or circulated in Britain and the racialized, classed, and gendered imaginaries of empire. English literature was informed by imperial concerns and anti-capitalist critique alike since the sixteenth century, even as England was a minor player among European imperial powers. Contemporary scholarship, while attending to marginalized authors, such as women, immigrants, minorities, and the working class, demonstrates that diverse literature, prose especially, but also drama and verse, were shaped by expanding trade, global markets, territorial appropriations, military conquests, human emigration, and cultural contact. A mix of ideologies spawned in the nineteenth century to rationalize British presence as not only inevitable but beneficial for the colonized; for colonized intellectuals, on the other hand, literature fostered alternative visions of resistance. Diasporic writers in twentieth-century Britain introduced readers to the vocabulary and memory of colonized lands. The chapter contends that many themes of contemporary culture are not unique to the present but variations of older, far-flung contests. Literature, in its ability to articulate shifts in perception, sensibilities, and relations before such changes are actualized, is an indispensable site of analysis and study.

Drawing on Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, the introduction develops a theory of finance capital as a complex historical process, which, during the modernist period, involved the economic and cultural turn toward London, the rise of the modern corporation, the growth of the professional classes, and the emergence of affect as value form. The introduction differentiates this definition of finance capital from those definitions that inform the field of critical financial studies, and it surveys economic criticism in modernist studies to demonstrate the minimal attention paid to finance capital in the field despite the fact that the period corresponds to an era of rapid and widespread financialization. The introduction argues that the crisis in representation often identified with modernism participates in a historical moment of financial crisis as artists and intellectuals account for the emergence of new value forms like speculation, volatility, risk, and affect.