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Drawing on provocative research, volumes in the series provide timely revisions of the nineteenth-century's literature and culture.

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7 results in Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture

Writing the Sphinx
  • Literature, Culture and Egyptology
  • Eleanor Dobson
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2026
  • Unearths a rich tradition of creative flexibility, collaboration and mutual influence between literary culture and Egyptology.

    The first monograph study to bring literature into conversation with Egyptological cultureIncorporates a number of archival primary sources which have, until now,　escaped critical attentionAnalyses canonical literature alongside works by lesser-known authors Combines literary criticism with book history, the history of science, and reception studiesThis book explores literary and Egyptological cultures from the closing decades of the nineteenth century to the opening decades of the twentieth, culminating in the aftermath of the high-profile discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. Analysing the works of Egyptologists including Howard Carter, Arthur Weigall and E. A. Wallis Budge alongside those of their literary contemporaries such as H. Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli and Oscar Wilde, it investigates the textual, cultural and material exchanges between literature, Egyptology and visual and material culture across this period.

1895
  • Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain
  • Nicholas Freeman
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    04 August 2026
  • Explores the lasting cultural and political impact of the events of this remarkable year.

    Oscar Wilde's libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry and its disastrous repercussions dominated British newspapers during the spring of 1895, but as this innovative study reveals, the Wilde scandal was by no means the only event to capture the public's imagination that year. Freak weather, a flu epidemic, a General Election, industrial unrest, 'sex novels' and New Women, trials of murderers and fraudsters, accidents, anarchists, bombers, balloonists and bicyclists were all topics of interest and alarm. Had Jack the Ripper returned? Did the Prime Minister have a dreadful secret? Were Aubrey Beardsley's drawings corrupting the nation's morals? Were overpaid foreign players corrupting English football? Could cricket save a degenerate nation from moral ruin?Drawing on strikingly diverse primary sources, Nicholas Freeman examines the recurrent preoccupations of a turbulent year, showing how 1890s' Britain is at once far removed from our own day and yet strangely familiar.

Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature
  • Rethinking Urban Modernity
  • Ben Moore
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    01 March 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2024
  • Ben Moore presents a new approach to reading urban modernity in nineteenth-century literature, by bringing together hidden, mobile and transparent features of city space as part of a single system he calls 'invisible architecture'. Resisting narratives of the nineteenth-century as progressing from concealment to transparency, he instead argues for a dynamic interaction between these tendencies. Across two parts, this book addresses a range of apparently disparate buildings and spaces. Part I offers new readings of three writers and their cities: Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester, Charles Dickens and London, and Émile Zola and Paris, focusing on the cellar-dwelling, the railway and river, and the department store respectively. Part II takes a broader view by analysing three spatial forms that have not usually been considered features of nineteenth-century modernity: the Gothic cathedral, the arabesque and white walls. Through these readings, the book extends our understanding of the uneven modernity of this period.

The Alternative Modernity of the Bicycle in British and French Literature, 1880-1920

The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry
  • Olivia Loksing Moy
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    06 June 2023
    Print publication:
    30 September 2022
  • A lonely damsel imprisoned within a castle or convent cell. The eavesdropping of a prisoner next door. The framed image of a woman with a sinister past. These familiar tropes from 1790s novels and tales exploded onto the English literary scene in 'low-brow' titles of Gothic romance. Surprisingly, however, they also re-emerged as features of major Victorian poems from the 1830s to 1870s. Such signature tropes - inquisitional overhearing; female confinement and the damsel in distress; supernatural switches between living and dead bodies - were transfigured into poetic forms that we recognise and teach today as canonically Victorian. The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry identifies a poetics of Gothic enclosure constitutive of high Victorian poetry that came to define key nineteenth-century poetic forms, from the dramatic monologue, to women's sonnet sequences and metasonnets, to Pre-Raphaelite picture poems.

Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status
  • Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform
  • Albert D. Pionke
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    25 April 2023
    Print publication:
    30 November 2022
  • Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status recovers the novelistic pervasiveness of a Reform-Era rhetorical form, the negative assertion of value, which grounds middle-class claims to social authority in repudiations of such conventional warrants as birth, wealth, numerical preponderance, command of fact and, specifically for women, the symbolic phallus. Bringing together historical, literary and sociological theory, this study recaptures the Victorians' broad sense of epistemological uncertainty about their rapidly changing society, reconstructs novelists' specific attempts to legitimate their traditionally low-status genre and offers fresh readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William North, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Yonge, among others.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman