How should we understand Victorian conflict? The Victorians were divided between multiple views of the political, religious and social issues that motivated their changing aspirations. Such debates are a fundamental aspect of the literature of the period and these essays propose new ways of understanding their significance.

This collection of essays proposes new ways of understanding Victorian cultural conflict and difference and the significance they hold for the literary culture of the period

List of Illustrations Notes on the Contributors Introduction; D.Birch  & M.Llewellyn Argument as Conflict - Then and Now; H.Small Ever a Fighter: Browning's Struggle with Conflict; H.F.Tucker Conflict and Imperial Communication: Narrating the First Afghan War; M.O'Cinneide Off-White Indians; K.Flint The Interpretation of Daydreams: Reverie as Site of Conflict in Early Victorian Psychiatry; N.Ford 'If I am not grotesque I am nothing': Aubrey Beardsley and Disabled Identities in Conflict; A.Tankard Negotiating the Gentle-Man: Male Nursing and Class Conflict in the 'High' Victorian Period; H.Furneaux 'Resolved in defiance of fool and of knave'?: Chartism, Children and Conflict; M.Chase Conversing with Monstrosities: evolutionary theory and the contemporary response to Wilkie Collins; J.M.Allan Dickens and the Heritage Industry: or, Culture and the Commodity; J.John The King and Who? Dance, Difference, and Identity in Anna Leonowens and The King and I ; S.A.Weltman 'The Utmost Intricacies of the Soul's Pathways': The Significance of Syntax in George Eliot's Felix Holt, The Radical (1866); M.Raines Culture Wars? Arnold's Essays in Criticism and the Rise of Journalism 1864-1895; L.Brake Shrieking Sisters and Bawling Brothers: Sibling Rivalry in Sarah Grand and Mary Cholmondeley; G.Ofek After Eternal Punishment: 'Fin de Siècle' as Literary Eschatology; M.Bradley Selected Bibliography Index