Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s

The fullest account yet published of the diverse, global literary culture of the crucial transition between Romantic and Victorian eras.

A detailed and engaging exploration of a crucial transitional period between the Romantic and Victorian ages, this instalment covers a diverse range of literary and cultural forms to reimagine the 1830s, including within its ambit canonical figures such as Dickens and the Brontës alongside marginal voices from around the globe.This instalment in the Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition series concerns a decade that was as technologically transitional as it was eventful on a global scale. It collects work from a group of internationally renowned scholars across disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with the wide array of cultural developments that defined the 1830s. Often overlooked as a boundary between the Romantic and Victorian periods, this decade was, the book proposes, the central pivot of the nineteenth century. Far from a time of peaceful reform, it was marked by violent colonial expansion, political resistance, and revolutionary technologies such as the photograph, the expansion of steam power, and the railway that changed the world irreversibly. Contributors explore a flurry of cultural forms to take the pulse of the decade, from Silver Fork fiction to lithography, from working-class periodicals to photographs, and from urban sketches to magazine fiction.