Close Reading the Nineteenth Century

This collection of essays provides upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers with a fresh view of the nineteenth century through 18 readings of individual texts from 1800-1900, chosen to show the range and diversity of the Romantic-Victorian period, combining the still-canonical with the newly recovered. After decades of critical focus on historical context, this collection seeks to re-centre close analysis on the literary text broadly conceived attending to form and texture, while also drawing in dialogues with other texts, responses and contexts. The aim is not to displace historical awareness, but to show how it might be combined with attention to literary shape, which is itself subject to historical, political and aesthetic forces. The 18 readings explore poetry, fiction, essays, drama and periodicals, ensuring full coverage of the formal and thematic diversity of print culture across the century. Our claim is that close reading emerges in the nineteenth century as a central concern of literary, critical and cultural practice. The collection seeks to disrupt the conventional critical division of Romantic from Victorian, showing how formal experimentation works throughout the nineteenth century as literary shape is recreated in each decade of cultural and technological development, alongside a continuous dialogue with literary commonalities and inheritances.