Victorian Literature - English

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Victorian Literature

Suggested Reading List for Ph.D. candidates
Please note that the following is a general list, designed so that students can refine and add to it

in consultation with their major examiner.
Basic Background
Specialists: have a working general familiarity with 30 of the works on the following list.
Nonspecialists: Read at least five of the following.

Adams, James Eli, A History of Victorian Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
Altick, Richard. Victorian People and Ideas, 1973.
 Anger, Suzy. Victorian Interpretation (Cornell UP 2005).
---. Knowing the Past (Cornell UP 2001).
 Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics (Routledge, 1996).
---. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics, 1993.
Armstorng, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction, 1987.
---. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719 to 1900, 2006.
Auerbach, Nina. Women and the Demon, 1983.
Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1988.
 Bristow, Joseph, ed. The Fin-de-Siecle Poem (Ohio UP, 2005).
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990.
Chadwick, Cowen. The Victorian Church, 1963.
Cheyette, Bryan. Construction of the Jew in English Literature and Society, 1993.
Claeys, Gregory, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (Cambridge, 2010).
Cohen, William A. Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction, 1996.
Cronin, Ciaran. et al. A Companion to Victorian Poetry (Blackwell, 2007).
Daly, Nicholas. Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge UP, 2000).
David, Deirdre ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge, 2001).
Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire, 1990.
Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger:Studies in Irish Culture, 1996.

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 Galchinsky, Michael. The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer” Romance

and Reform in Victorian England (Wayne State UP, 1996)

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979.
Goodlad, Lauren M. E. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State (Johns Hopkins 2003).
Houghton, Walter. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1957.
Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody's Angels: Middle Class Women and Domestic Ideology

in Victorian Culture, 1995.

James, Louis. The Victorian Novel (Blackwell 2006).
Jones, Jason B. Lost Causes: Historical Consciousness in Victorian Literature, 2006.
Knight, Mark, and Emma Mason. Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An

Introduction, (Oxford UP, 2006).

Ledger, Sally, and Roger Luckhurst, eds. The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History

1880-1900 (Oxford, 2000).

Lesjak, Carolyn. Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel (Duke UP, 2006).
Levine, George. How to Read the Victorian Novel (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007).
Maltz, Diana. British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870–1900: Beauty for

the People (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

(Princeton UP, 2007).

Marcus, Steven. Other Victorians, 1966.
Marshall, Gail ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siecle (Cambridge UP, 2007).
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather (Rutledge, 1995).
Miller, D.A.. The Novel and the Police, 1988.
Moretti, Franco. selections from The Novel 1 and 2 (Princeton UP, 2007).
 ---. Graphs Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (Verson, 2007).
O’Malley, Patrick R. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture

(Cambridge UP, 2006).

Outka, Elizabeth. Consuming Traditions (Oxford UP, 2008).
Picker, John M. Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford UP, 2003).

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Poon, Angelia. Enacting Englishness in the Victorian Period (Ashgate, 2008).
Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments, 1988.
Prins, Yopie. Victorian Sappho (Princeton UP, 1999).
Ragussis, Michael. Figures of Conversion: The Jewish Question and English National

Identity, 1995.

 Richardson, LeeAnne. New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in Victorian

Britain: Gender, Genre, and Empire (UP of Florida, 2006)

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism, 1993.
Schaffer, Talia. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (Virginia UP, 2000).
Secord, James A. Victorian Sensation: the Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and

Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago UP, 2000)

Shires, Linda M. Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century

England (Ohio State UP, 2009).

---. Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History, and the Politics of Gender, 1992.
 Silver, Carol G. Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness, 2000.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 1988.
Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India, 1992.
Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians, 1918.
Tucker, Herbert, ed. A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (Blackwell, 1999).
 Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late

Victorian London (Chicago UP, 1992).

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City, 1973.
---. Culture and Society
Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny, and Literature

(Palgrave, 2002).

Fiction: read at least three (specialists) / two (non-specialists) works by each of the following:

Jane Austen George Eliot

Charlotte Bronte Thomas Hardy

Charles Dickens William M. Thackeray

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Also have a strong familiarity with at least five (specialists) three (non-specialists) of the
following:

Grace Aguilar  Sheridan Le Fanu
William Beckford  Amy Levy
George Borrow  George Macdonald
Elizabeth Braddon  George Meredith
Ann Brontë  George Moore
Charlotte Brontë  William Morris
Emily Brontë  Arthur Morrison
Samuel Butler  John Henry Newman
Mona Caird  Margaret Oliphant
Wilkie Collins  Ouida
Mary de Morgan  Charles Reade
Benjamin Disraeli  Walter Scott
Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)  Flora Annie Steele
Arthur Conan Doyle  Robert Louis Stevenson
 Amelia Edwards  Bram Stoker
George Egerton  Anthony Trollope
Elizabeth Gaskell  Frances Trollope
George Gissing  Mrs. Humphrey (Mary) Ward
Sarah Grand  H. G. Wells
 Charles Kingsley  Oscar Wilde
 Rudyard Kipling

Students may also choose to use one of many strong collections of Victorian Short fiction such
as Michael Cox’s The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (Oxford, 2003) or The Oxford
Book of Victorian Detective Stories (Oxford, 2003), Jack Zipes' collection, Victorian Fairy
Tales, or Elaine Showalter’s Daughters of Decadance anthology (Rutgers UP, 1993).

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Poetry: Have a strong familiarity with the important poems of the following:

Matthew Arnold  Gerard Manley Hopkins

Robert Browning  Christina Rossetti
Elizabeth Barrett Browning  Alfred Lord Tennyson

Also (specialists only) have a familiarity with at least five of the following:

Emily Bronte  Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.)

 Arthur Hugh Clough  Amy Levy
 Ernest Dowson  George Meredith
 Michael Field  Charlotte Mew

Edward Fitzgerald  William Morris

Felicia Hemans  Dante Gabriel Rossetti

William Ernest Henley  Charles Algernon Swinburne

A.E. Housman  James Thomson

Rudyard Kipling  Oscar Wilde

Poetic Theory

Know at least five essays on poetic theory from the Broadview Anthology by the following

authors:

Matthew Arnold J. S. Mill

Walter Bagehot Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Robert Buchanan Arthur Symons

Arthur Henry Hallam Oscar Wilde

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Prose: Know the listed works below:

Matthew Arnold Culture and Anarchy
Thomas Carlyle Sartor Resartus
John Stuart Mill Autobiography
John Henry Newman Apologia Pro Vita Sua

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Also (specialists only) be familiar with the prose writings of at least three of the following:

Grace Aguilar  Eliza Lynn Linton

Mona Caird  Thomas Babington Macaulay

Frances Power Cobbe Harriet Martineau

Charles Darwin Henry Mayhew

 Thomas De Quincey William Morris

George Eliot Walter Pater

 James Anthony Froude John Ruskin

 Edmund Gosse Herbert Spencer

 Thomas Henry Huxley Oscar Wilde

 Vernon Lee

Biography: Be familiar with at least four of the following works:

 Barker, Juliet. The Brontës (St. Martin’s, 1995)
 Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans (1996)
 Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde (1987)
 Forster, Margaret. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography (Doubleday, 1989)
 Haite, Gordon. George Eliot (1968)
 Honan, Park. Matthew Arnold (1983)
 Hunt, Linda. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Ohio UP, 2000)
 Irvine, William and Park Honan. The Ring, the Book, and the Poet (1974)
 Johnson, Edgar. Charles Dickens (1952)
 Kaplan, Fred. Thomas Carlyle (1983)
 Ker, Ian. John Henry Newman (1988)
 Ricks, Christopher. Tennyson (1972)
 Smith, Paul. Disraeli: A Brief Life (1996)
 Tomalin, Claire. Thomas Hardy (Penguin, 2007)