This book aims to intervene in current critical contexts for the study of nineteenth-century literature within the academy and beyond. Topics discussed include science and technology, poetry and philosophy, the Gothic, anatomical exhibitions, the global spread of liberalism, Anglo-American publishing, Punjabi popular culture and the neo-Victorian in literature, film and performance. By bringing together a broad range of intellectually challenging perspectives, the book offers an engaging critical overview of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies that will appeal both to scholars working within the field and students and teachers encountering this fascinating area of study for the first time.

Introduction - Andrew Smith and Anna Barton Part I: Critical reflections 1 On measuring the nineteenth century - John Schad 2 Literature and science - David Amigoni 3 Locke in pentameters: Victorian poetry after (or before) posthumousness - Anna Barton 4 Reading the Gothic and Gothic readers - Andrew Smith Part II: Rethinking national contexts and exchanges 5 The global circulation of Victorian actants and ideas: liberalism and liberalisation in the niche of nature, culture, and technology - Regenia Gagnier 6 Literary folk: writing popular culture in colonial Punjab, 1885-1905 - Churnjeet Mahn 7 'Across the waters of this disputed ocean': the material production of American literature in nineteenth-century Britain - Katie McGettigan 8 Gruesome models: European displays of natural history and anatomy and nineteenth-century literature - Laurence Talairach-Vielmas Part III: Afterlives 9 Adaptive/appropriate reuse in neo-Victorian fiction: having one's cake and eating it too - Marie-Luise Kohlke 10 Populism and ideology: nineteenth-century fiction and the cinema - Richard J. Hand 11 True histories of the Elephant Man: storytelling and theatricality in adaptations of the life of Joseph Merrick - Benjamin Poore Index