Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s

Explores the diverse forces that shaped developments in literature in the 1880s, an often overlooked literary decade.

This is the first publication in a new series from Cambridge University Press studying literary decades in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the 1880s, this collection of studies from leading scholars explores the diverse forces that shaped the literature of the decade.What does it mean to focus on the decade as a unit of literary history? Emerging from the shadows of iconic Victorian authors such as Eliot and Tennyson, the 1880s is a decade that has been too readily overlooked in the rush to embrace end-of-century decadence and aestheticism. The 1880s witnessed new developments in transatlantic networks, experiments in lyric poetry, the decline of the three-volume novel, and the revaluation of authors, journalists and the reading public. The contributors to this collection explore the case for the 1880s as both a discrete point of literary production, with its own pressures and provocations, and as part of literature's sense of its expanded temporal and geographical reach. The essays address a wide variety of authors, topics and genres, offering incisive readings of the diverse forces at work in the shaping of the literary 1880s.