Why Victorian Literature Still Matters (Wiley-Blackwell Manifestos) - Hardcover

Davis, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1405135786 ISBN 13: 9781405135788

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008

Synopsis

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is a passionate defense of Victorian literature’s enduring impact and importance for readers interested in the relationship between literature and life, reading and thinking.

• Explores the prominence of Victorian literature for contemporary readers and academics, through the author’s unique insight into why it is still important today
• Provides new frames of interpretation for key Victorian works of literature and close readings of important texts
• Argues for a new engagement with Victorian literature, from general readers and scholars alike
• Seeks to remove Victorian literature from an entrenched set of values, traditions and perspectives - demonstrating how vital and resonant it is for modern literary and cultural analysis

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is a passionate defense of the enduring impact of Victorian realism today. With a nod to the popularity of phrenology within that era, noted literary scholar Philip Davis points to a corner of the human mind where all Victorian literature resides. This "Victorian bump," he argues, is an area concerned with human purpose, morality, secularization and belief, human stories, and living in time.

Rather than emphasizing Victorian literature as an historical and reassuring body of knowledge, Davis explains its centrality for contemporary readers as an important mode of thinking and feeling, and provides a gateway of analysis into the popular prose and poetry of the Victorian Age. Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is a positive manifesto, inviting readers to discover what they really like about a book. The author offers an insightful window for readers to formulate a sense of what Victorian literature means for them and how it relates to our wider human existence.

About the Author:

Philip Davis is Professor of English Literature in the School of English, University of Liverpool, UK. He is the author of The Victorians and, most recently, Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life. His other books include The Experience of Reading; Real Voices: On Reading, and Memory and Writing: from Wordsworth to Lawrence, as well as works on Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson. He is also editor of The Reader, a non-academic literary magazine aimed at the serious reader.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1405135786
• ISBN 13: 9781405135788
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 184