All Outputs (18)

Fluid performances: The circulation of milk in late-nineteenth century fiction and culture (2021)
Book Chapter

This chapter analyses how the social circulation of milk is performed in realist-naturalist writings of the late nineteenth century. Milk becomes an unalienable property of the nurturing body, a circulating property of instrumental modernity and, at... Read More about Fluid performances: The circulation of milk in late-nineteenth century fiction and culture.

Foreword (2018)
Book Chapter

Race and biology (2016)
Book Chapter

The period 1880-1920 saw the emergence and then the qualified effacing of powerful discourses of racial essentialism and biological determinism: it was a period profoundly influenced, even mesmerized, by the authority of Darwinian science. This chapt... Read More about Race and biology.

Naturalism and decadence: The case of Hubert Crackanthorpe (2013)
Book Chapter

This chapter examines the conjunctions between naturalist poetics and decadent sensibility in late nineteenth-century British fiction. It examines how the highly influential yet aesthetically problematic reach of naturalism became entangled in debate... Read More about Naturalism and decadence: The case of Hubert Crackanthorpe.

Hardy and friendship (2013)
Book Chapter

This chapter argues that, as with many writers, the experience of friend and friendship for the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is intimately bound up with the development of the faculty of the creative imagination and the pursuit of the w... Read More about Hardy and friendship.

Guardianship and fellowship: Radicalism and the ecological imagination 1880-1940 (2012)
Book Chapter

This essay examines the interplay between strands of ecological thinking and radical politics in Britain between 1880 and 1940, focussing on the notion of guardianship - as opposed to mastery - of the earth. An efflorescence of political-ecological t... Read More about Guardianship and fellowship: Radicalism and the ecological imagination 1880-1940.

Shakespeare and politics (2011)
Book Chapter

This essay examines the complex ways in which Shakespeare’s plays, and the figure of Shakespeare himself becomes entangled in political argument from the post-Napoleonic years until the early twentieth century, particularly as a source of inspiration... Read More about Shakespeare and politics.

Provincial Fiction and the Decline of 'Puritan England' (2010)
Book Chapter

This chapter situates three major exponents of provincial fiction, Thomas Hardy, ‘Mark Rutherford’ and Arnold Bennett, in relation to ideas about provincialism, and changes in the relationship between the metropolitan centre and provincial and region... Read More about Provincial Fiction and the Decline of 'Puritan England'.

Reading matter and the matter of reading in Gissing’s fiction (2010)
Book Chapter

This chapter revisits George Gissing’s handling of reading practices within the realist frame of his practice as a novelist to show the variety of reality effects linked to reading matter and the reading subject – the choice of books, their location... Read More about Reading matter and the matter of reading in Gissing’s fiction.

Thomas Hardy’s notebooks (2009)
Book Chapter

Socialism and radicalism (2007)
Book Chapter

This chapter examines the flowering of radical and socialist political cultures at the fin de siècle in which forms of collectivism, as against individualism, gain increasing prominence. The influence of Comtean Positivism, Philosophical Idealism and... Read More about Socialism and radicalism.

Re-situating Grant Allen: Writing, radicalism and modernity (2005)
Book Chapter

This 10,000-word introductory chapter is the first essay in the collection Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, edited by William Greenslade and Terence Rodgers. It seeks to place Grant Allen's polymathic achievement -... Read More about Re-situating Grant Allen: Writing, radicalism and modernity.

'Will it smash?': Modernity and the fear of falling (2002)
Book Chapter

This chapter traces the motif of the financial crash in realist novels by Dickens, Trollope and Eliot in which the inherent irrationality of capitalist relations is revealed within a broadly explicable ethical universe. By the end of the century, in... Read More about 'Will it smash?': Modernity and the fear of falling.

Writing against himself: Gissing and the lure of modernity in 'in the year of jubilee' (2001)
Book Chapter

Rediscovering Hardy's "Facts" notebook (2000)
Book Chapter

From his early twenties, until his death, Thomas Hardy was an habitual - even obsessive - note-taker. He kept notebooks, some of pocket-size, from early on in his career, only to destroy most of them or leave instructions that the remainder should be... Read More about Rediscovering Hardy's "Facts" notebook.

Revisiting Edward Aveling (2000)
Book Chapter

While the mythologising of nature in British writing at the end of the long nineteenth century has been often regarded as nostalgic, escapist and evasive, this chapter argues that such writing found in the cult of ‘Pan’ and ‘The Open Road’ imaginativ... Read More about Revisiting Edward Aveling.

"Pan" and the open road (2000)
Book Chapter

While the mythologising of nature in British writing at the end of the long nineteenth century has been often regarded as nostalgic, escapist and evasive, this chapter argues that such writing found in the cult of ‘Pan’ and ‘The Open Road’ imaginativ... Read More about "Pan" and the open road.

Fitness and the Fin de Siècle (1992)
Book Chapter

In 1901, William Morris’s biographer J. W. Mackail gave a lecture on Morris to the I.L.P. Mackail infused the occasion with a pronounced sense of an ending. There was a feeling abroad, he said, that the nineteenth century had been a failure. Ideals h... Read More about Fitness and the Fin de Siècle.