Crime and Horror in Victorian Literature and Culture Volume I

<p>This two-volume anthology charts the socioeconomic cultural and psychological anxieties that shaped nineteenth-century British literature and popular culture. In a rapidly changing world in an era marked by unprecedented prosperity and widespread poverty the Victorians aggressively policed—and clandestinely crossed—increasingly porous and unstable boundaries. <em>Crime and Horror in Victorian Literature and Culture</em> maps the nineteenth-century British preoccupation with phenomena that rattled Western middle-class subjectivity: criminality monstrosity sexual transgression alien cultures and the breakdown of social norms. Ranging widely both chronologically and generically the anthology provides examples of short and long fiction poetry plays government reports journalism social criticism and polemic from 1829 to 1904. It includes writing on criminology colonialism racism prostitution sexual exploitation prison and capital punishment. Other topics include atypical bodies mental illness suicide and homelessness. <br /><br />Volume I is organized around four rubrics: the slum; the criminal mind; power and punishment; and streetwalking. With a wide range of primary source material and extensive annotations this volume includes texts out of print since the late nineteenth century as well as Arthur Morrison’s slum novel <em>A Child of the Jago</em> and works by Charles Dickens Elizabeth Browning Arthur Conan Doyle Oscar Wilde Harriet Martineau Frances Power Cobbe Marie Corelli and many others.</p><p><strong>Matthew Kaiser</strong> is an associate professor and chair of English at the University of California Merced. He is the author of <em>The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept </em>(Stanford University Press 2012) the translator of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s <em>Venus in Furs </em>(Cognella 2017) and the editor of seven books including Alan Dale’s <em>A Marriage Below Zero</em> (Cognella 2011) and the forthcoming <em>A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Empire</em> (Bloomsbury 2019).</p>