This chapter argues that Gissing’s novels offer significant and philosophically sophisticated engagements with the novel of ideas. Gissing’s study of Schopenhauer’s works led him to take a keen interest in post-Kantian idealism and in fundamental questions regarding the irreconcilability of the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’. These concerns are reflected in the novels Gissing wrote in the 1880s – these books satirize the idealist pretensions of social reformers, and they demonstrate that the philanthropic ideals of the Settlement Movement were bound to fail when confronted with the complex and harsh reality of London’s East End. Gissing’s novels are animated by a set of questions that bear directly on the history of the novel of ideas: are aspirational ideals necessarily external and alien to the literary work, or is it possible for them to be assimilated into the medium of literary form? Is it possible for these ideals to become artistically productive?

Travelling and staying on the ‘continent’ has shaped writers’ ideas of Europe and of Britain’s place within Europe; it has also impacted their work and its reception. British writers have crossed the Channel for a multitude of reasons, including health and recreation, education, or the wish to escape from their own country and its conventions and laws. This chapter highlights two periods of high mobility and exchange during times of prolonged peace between Britain and other European powers: the early and mid-Victorian years, and the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Case studies show how writers’ relationship with Europe is marked not only by their Englishness, but always also by personal circumstances: focusing on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Howitt attends to women’s places in Victorian literature; for the contemporary period, Julian Barnes and Adam Thorpe are discussed as well-known commentators on France and French culture. The chapter asks what attracted and continues to attract writers to Europe, and in what ways they and their work relate to European cultures and languages.

This chapter examines the conscious automata theory as advanced by Thomas Huxley in his controversial essay “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History” (1874), which posits that human consciousness is a mere byproduct of neural processes, not, as is widely thought, the initiator or controller of voluntary behavior. This chapter asks why a theory that denied the efficacy of consciousness strongly captured the Victorian cultural imagination, and considers the implications of the view for aesthetic production. It explores late nineteenth-century responses to conscious automatism in philosophy, psychology, literature, and popular culture, before looking more closely at the treatment of the ideas in Samuel Butler’s “Book of the Machines” and George Eliot’s “Shadows of the Coming Race,” alongside George Henry Lewes’s Physical Basis of Mind. The chapter argues that rather than diminishing consciousness, Huxley’s theory removes consciousness from science and hands it over to aesthetics and, especially, literary texts.

This chapter focuses on imaginative engagements with the steam engine in nineteenth-century literature. Following James Watt’s patent in 1781, the steam engine became an obsessive focus of literary writing, with reactions ranging from Thomas Carlyle’s denunciation of the steam-powered mechanization of the mind to Walt Whitman’s rhapsodic vision in “To a Locomotive in Winter” of the steam railway engine as “The type of the modern – emblem of motion and power – pulse of the continent.” In the nineteenth century, the steam engine became a symbolic magnet for working through new conceptions of logic and rationality, mobility and freedom, distance and proximity, city and country, and the natural and the manmade. Kirkby shows how Victorian authors picked up the new rhythms of the steam age, also providing their readers with “psychosomatic inoculation to the impact of railway travel on the nervous system.”

This chapter models the use of digital humanities methodologies to study semantic history. Corpus analysis and geographical information systems techniques are applied to trace the use of the word ‘sublime’ in a large collection of digitized literary works from the final decade of the nineteenth century. This collection, which comprises nearly 10,000 texts from the 1890s, was extracted from the British Library’s Nineteenth-Century Books Corpus. The chapter explains the steps involved in extracting and analyzing this portion of the corpus. It then presents a case study focused on the contexts, meanings, and locations associated with the word ’sublime’ in literary works from the 1890s. This case study tests a hypothesis derived by consulting the Oxford English Dictionary, which suggests that by the end of the nineteenth century, ‘sublime’ was often used unsystematically as an intensifier, as a word for labeling any experience or phenomena that defied description.

The idea of the “oceanic” sits uneasily within the frame of nineteenth-century American literature. The categories “nineteenth-century,” “American,” and “literature” only partially account for the fluid and plural cultures of the ocean. A considerable part of the energy of the emerging field of oceanic studies comes from the ways in which it challenges traditional generic boundaries, historical eras, and conceptions of literature. A challenge in putting together a chapter about oceanic literature in nineteenth-century America – a task that is, fundamentally, about identifying a cogent and manageable archive – lies in dealing with the tensions that this energy generates. While it would be relatively simple to chronicle written texts about the sea by American authors, doing so would fail to tell the whole story about oceanic literature in the USA at this period of time. Conversely, if a limitation of this sort is not applied, the category of oceanic literature becomes so bloated as to become unmanageable and pointless. But a problem of this sort is ultimately a catalyzing one, for it foregrounds questions of definition that are significant when creating a primary body of texts of any sort. Accordingly, in what follows, the aim will be to build up gradually, from solid foundations – texts that are unproblematically American, oceanic, and, well, texts – into gradually more speculative terrains, where such designations might not hold. Along the way, the chapter will also allude to some of the theoretical issues that have structured the field for those who wish to explore them further as well as some of the sociopolitical and historical contexts that framed the life of the ocean in the era.

This introduction sketches a cultural history of dinosaur palaeontology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indicating how the book addresses the lack of literary work on the understanding of dinosaurs in this period. While dinosaurs were a British area of science in the first half of the nineteenth century, American palaeontologists took clear pre-eminence in this field from the 1870s. American research transformed dinosaurs from giant lizards into a far stranger and more heterogenous group. Fallon argues that literary scholars have not yet grappled with this cultural shift in perceptions of the dinosaurs, an omission made all the more striking by the fact that it was during the decades around 1900 that ‘dinosaur’ first became a household word. Built into this word were important ideas about imperialism, progress, romance, and the practice of science. Fallon explains how exploring this subject provides wider insights into the relationships between literature and science and between popular and specialist science writers, in addition to its value as a case study on the transatlantic nature of literary media at the end of the nineteenth century.

This chapter considers a range of methods for writing about literary soundscapes. R. Murray Schafer’s seminal coinage of soundscape residually informs current debates about the sonic dimensions of literary form, but the discursive alignment of print and voice and reading and listening is an enduring aspect of the history of modern literature. This history extends from the capacious descriptive ambition of the realist novel through to, and beyond, literary modernism’s experimental ambition to capture the sounds of modern life at a critical moment when an array of recording devices emerged to do what literature could not – record sound in real time. Spanning from Charles Dickens to Elizabeth Bowen, this chapter analyses the various ways writers from the nineteenth century to the present have responded to the sound worlds in which they lived by attending to the distinctive sonic textures of literary language and its unique capacity to channel the rhythms and voices of everyday socially embodied sound.

The vibrant periodical culture of the nineteenth century was significantly formed by writers and publishers from Ireland and Scotland. These journalists were often athwart what we now regard as canonical Romantic and Victorian writing, and in their work crafted a satiric, parodic counterpoint to new valorisations of poetic insight, imaginative originality and aesthetic disinterestedness. The work of William Maginn and Francis Sylvester Mahony demonstrates the transnational, polyglossic and multifaceted authorial games that periodical culture enabled. Whether remembered as proto-postmodern critics of poetic afflatus, or embittered hacks squandering their potential for a pay cheque, periodical writers created a literature teetering between brilliant comedy and tedious sniping. Undermining ideas of authenticity and authorial originality, periodical literature brought to the fore tensions inherent in nineteenth-century celebrations of national culture and aesthetic idealism.

The Introduction begins with the challenge of understanding the impact of settler colonialism on Victorian literary culture when it is largely invisible as a subject. It proposes that settler colonialism reveals common ground between the novel and political economy, centered on their shared investments in the Scottish Enlightenment’s stadial theory of societal development, which saw settled cultivation as the threshold to civilization, culture, and capital. Drawing on the claims of British world history, I argue that the cultural texts of settler colonialism were inseparable from its financial considerations throughout the Victorian period, while Franco Moretti’s model of “place-bound” genre offers a localized understanding of literary form that allows for the shaping influence of settler environments. When ideas of British subjectivity and society were challenged by events in Australia and New Zealand, writers responded through formal innovations in the novel and political economy. In addition, retracing imperial networks of influence and exchange brings to light the material pathways that allowed specific settler revisions of British identity to reshape metropolitan writing.

This chapter offers a concluding series of brief reflections on Victorian studies and settler colonialism, and on the methodologies and influences that shaped the argument of this book. It emphasizes the role of “located thinking” in the development of its argument, and considers the mixed nature of the influence of British world histories on the project.