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Cultural confidence, moral superiority, and metropolitan elitism: these characteristics of the 1870s are exemplified by Harley Granville-Barker’s edited collection of essays, The Eighteen-Seventies (1929), which offers a nostalgic, aristocratic, Oxbridge, and high-culture account of this decade. But this present collection, in the spirit of the series to which it belongs, frames the 1870s as a decade in transition, and seeks to unsettle its conventional associations while acknowledging their force and legacy. Indeed, writers of the 1870s were especially adept at questioning their current temporal moment, often betraying an overdetermined sense of their place in time, and even of temporality itself.
The 1870s were defined by cultural confidence, moral superiority, and metropolitan elitism. This volume examines and unsettles a decade closely associated with 'High Victorianism' and the popular emergence of 'Victorian' as a term for the epoch and its literature. Writers active in the 1870s were self-conscious about contemporary claims to modernity, reform, and progress, themes which they explored through conversation, conflict, and innovation, often betraying uncertainty about their era. The chapters in this volume cover a broad range of canonical and lesser known British and colonial writers, including George Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Rossettis, Emily Pfeiffer, John Ruskin, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Ellen Wood, Toru Dutt, Antony Trollope, Dinah Craik, Susan K. Phillips, Thomas Hardy, and Rolf Boldrewood. Together they offer a variety of methodologies for a pluralist literary history, including approaches based on feminism, visual cultures, digital humanities, and the history of narrative and poetic genres.
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