This article proposes postmodern narrative techniques in John Fowles’ fiction, emphasizing their intertextual nature and philosophical implications. Drawing on theoretical foundations of postmodernism, reader-response criticism, and intertextual theory, the study analyzes how Fowles uses metafictional devices, temporal fragmentation, and polyphonic narration to destabilize traditional narrative authority. The focus is on the novels The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Magus, and Daniel Martin, where the author’s narrative playfulness is intertwined with existential concerns and historical reimaginings. The study also highlights how Fowles bridges literary traditions, tracing explicit and implicit intertextual references to Victorian literature, classical mythology, and modernist narrative practices.

This study examines the representation of social class in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights through the lens of Marxist literary criticism. While previous research has discussed themes such as class hierarchy, symbolic power, and economic determinism, limited attention has been given to how these dynamics are directly embedded in the novel’s dialogue and narrative interactions. To address this gap, this research analyzes twenty selected textual excerpts using key Marxist concepts, including class struggle, ideology, and material conditions. The study employs a qualitative descriptive approach, drawing on the works of Marx and Engels, Eagleton, and other theorists to interpret how language and character behavior reflect social positioning. The findings show that Wuthering Heights portrays a deeply stratified social environment in which identities, decisions, and conflicts are shaped by class-based power relations. Heathcliff’s marginalization, Catherine’s status-driven choices, and Hindley’s abusive dominance embody recurring patterns of oppression and resistance consistent with Marxist theory. The study concludes that Brontë’s novel not only dramatizes interpersonal tensions but also exposes the structural inequalities that govern them, offering a more nuanced understanding of how Victorian literature reflects and critiques social class. This research contributes to existing scholarship by providing a dialogue-centered, textually grounded analysis that clarifies the mechanisms of class representation more precisely than broader thematic studies.

Molly R. Young, “Vanity Fair and the End of the Everyday” (pp. 139–160) Vanity Fair (1847–48) is rarely associated with “the everyday” in Victorian literature, but in this article, I argue that Thackeray’s novel engages and complicates prevailing scholarly assumptions about its status. Regularly associated with realism and its Romantic inheritance, the everyday is understood to rationalize life’s most erratic features within a shared realm of ordinary experience, making those features into meaningful and ethically valuable novelistic content. But in Vanity Fair, Thackeray offers a formal and philosophical critique of such stabilizing effects. He first uses a languid, distinctly deflating style to reveal how the everyday eludes narration, and then offers the experience of the narrator himself as a test case for its moral and social value. In showing the everyday to be a gnarlier, more troubling concept than typically assumed, Thackeray’s corrosive skepticism allows for a new assessment of novelists with whom the term is more commonly associated. The everyday in George Eliot, for instance—arguably the Victorian writer most associated with the term—is structured by Eliot’s own critique when we consider not only her inheritance of Wordsworth or frequent recourse to rural settings and scenes of domestic life, but also her narrator’s mercurial, uneasy inhabitation of everydayness in both story and discourse. Thackeray thus reminds us that the Victorians didn’t merely absorb the Romantic ideals of the everyday, but they also reshaped them as they encountered the burdensome demands of practice.

Abstract Rationalists portray science as reason’s crown and see any deference to feeling and imagination as an attack on reason. They dismiss Romanticism as mere regression and ignorance. The Romantic period (late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century) is, arguably, a fertile overlap of science and poetry. Rather than functioning as isolated disciplines, science and poetry in the Romantic era shared a language of wonder, imagination, and veneration for nature that defied the mechanistic rationalism of the Enlightenment. This paper reviews the collaboration between poets and scientists that reshaped cultural conceptions of knowledge, the natural world, and the human mind. Romantic thinkers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, along with natural philosophers like Humphry Davy and Goethe, treated imagination as a valid mode of inquiry. Their writings present nature not as an inert machine but as a dynamic, living organism. Wordsworth’s Prelude frames scientific observation as a moral and spiritual journey, while Coleridge’s theory of the “esemplastic imagination” parallels the unifying ambitions of contemporary natural philosophy. Similarly, Goethe’s morphological studies combined meticulous empirical methods with aesthetic insight, anticipating integrative approaches in modern science. Romantic literature registered ambivalence toward industrial and technological change. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein dramatized anxieties about unchecked scientific ambition, reflecting broader cultural tensions between vitalist and mechanistic worldviews. Romantic women writers such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld interrogated the gendered power structures of scientific discourse, widening the cultural conversation. By foregrounding feeling, creativity, and ecological sensitivity, Romanticism forged an integrated epistemology in which scientific discovery and poetic expression reinforced one another. This synthesis influenced Victorian literature, early environmental thought, and contemporary science communication, demonstrating the enduring relevance of Romantic ideals. The paper argues that revisiting Romantic science and poetry reveals a historical model for bridging today’s perceived divide between the sciences and the humanities. It attempts to show that imagination and empirical inquiry can coexist as complementary ways of knowing.

This research examines the complex representation of social class in Victorian literature, analyzing how major authors depicted, critiqued, and reinforced class hierarchies during a period of unprecedented social transformation. Through systematic analysis of canonical works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and Thomas Hardy, this study reveals how literary representations both reflected and shaped contemporary understanding of class identity, social mobility, and economic inequality. The research employs close textual analysis combined with historical contextualization to demonstrate how Victorian writers navigated the tension between social criticism and literary convention. Findings indicate that while Victorian literature increasingly challenged rigid class boundaries, it simultaneously reinforced middle-class values and perspectives as normative. The study contributes to understanding how literature functions as both mirror and constructor of social reality, with implications for contemporary analysis of class representation in cultural texts.

In so-called civilized societies, women who defy traditional norms or engage in “immoral” behavior are harshly judged and excluded. This dynamic is evident in Thomas Hardy’s The Ruined Maid, Augusta Webster’s A Castaway, and Émile Zola’s Nana, where female characters are portrayed as morally transgressive and socially irredeemable, reinforcing rigid binaries between virtue and vice. Applying Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality (1989), this paper explores how class, gender, societal expectations, and sexual politics converge to shape these women’s identities and societal reception. Findings reveal that the “fallen” women in the Victorian literary works resist confinement through economic agency, self-awareness, and even spectacle. Rather than passive victims, they emerge as complex figures whose lives defy singular interpretation. This study critiques the moralistic frameworks of Victorian literature while foregrounding intersectionality as a critical method for dismantling dominant narratives that persist in shaping modern gender norms. Ultimately, it calls for more liberating readings of women’s transgressions across time.

Abstract: This themed issue studies key coinages and linguistic borrowings of the long nineteenth century, foregrounding how such new words and fledgling phrases were ushered into works of Romantic and Victorian literature. The introductory essay first theorizes and historicizes “neology” and its kindred long-nineteenth century coinage, “neologism.” It then summarizes the argument and scope of the issue, paying particular attention to how each contributor’s essay relates to the themed issue’s larger areas of inquiry: “Neology and Genre,” “Neology and the State,” and “Neological Theory and Praxis.” This introduction discusses how the themed issue pays tribute to neology’s sprawling forms: they manifest as wordplay, etymological and multilingual borrowings, newly conjured compound words, canny acts of punning, old terms twisted into new parts of speech, and more. As a stretching of language, neology can take shape as a riposte to censorship, a travelogue, a sign of the times, a reckoning with the past.

The Moonstone, published in 1868, is a work of Victorian literature that has received little attention but is profoundly important. It sheds a definitive light on colonialism and the theme of othering set in the backdrop of a detective story. This paper discusses and attempts to unravel how the novel engages with the theme of British imperialism and the associated cultural considerations in its simplest form: a diamond is stolen from an Indian temple and brought to England. The Moonstone is a physical item, but its meaning expands to the symbol of the cultural and spiritual plundering requisite for colonial conquest. It prompts thinking around the notions of loss and belonging and the consequences of having imperial power. The novel's multi-narrative approach has been cited as a way of understanding how differing views on the same topic, in this case, colonialism and othering, can be affected by class and race. This argument is significant for understanding the different responses by British people to the curse of the diamond and the muted responses from Indian priests who wanted the diamond back. The article covers the erasure of the voices of the British-colonized Indian subjects and the moral dilemmas posed by the treasure mentioned above. It pursues the very goals Collins was critiquing by restating the divide between the rational West and the mystical East and how they embellish colonial rule. With a postcolonial view, this article explores the themes of guilt, cultural restoration, and displacement embedded in the text.

Two Victorianists in the English department at The University of New Haven describe their efforts to meaningfully incorporate Victorian studies into general education courses after a Victorian Literature survey was removed from the curriculum. Though the curriculum they are building is inspired by integrative liberal arts initiatives, the authors note how their curriculum and pedagogy is distinct from the great books tradition that guides other programs, outlining strategies for teaching literature with student-selected texts and art history with object-based analysis.

This paper examines Maggie Tulliver’s desire in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of flight. Challenging readings that view her desire as merely repressed, this study argues that it functions as a form of deterritorialization that disrupts nineteenth-century British patriarchal norms. Drawing on the concepts of territorialization, deterritorialization, and becoming, this paper traces Maggie’s flight from oppressive environments such as Dorlcote Mill and St. Ogg’s. Her interactions with Philip Wakem and Stephen Guest suggest a movement toward becoming-nature and the formation of rhizomatic connections that allow her to exceed social and familial boundaries. Her fraught relationship with her brother Tom operates both as a source of repression and as a catalyst for her flight. By framing the novel as an Anti-Bildungsroman, this study highlights its function as a socially engaged critique that reconfigures conventional paradigms of growth and integration. Maggie’s death can be interpreted as a moment of radical deterritorialization, exposing the constraints Victorian society places on female subjectivity. Ultimately, this paper offers a renewed reading of Maggie’s narrative trajectory and contributes to broader discussions of desire, gender, and subjectivity in Victorian literature.

This essay considers what a rewilding critical practice would look like with reference to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). At the ecological turn in literary studies, what is there that remains to be said about one of the most canonical novels in Victorian literature? To rewild Jane Eyre, a novel better known for its domestic interiors and production of individualist subjectivity, is to pay attention to the traces of its narrative shadow forests and strange otherweathers, to the latent potential of the novel’s more-than-human forms. Attending to Jane Eyre’s untamed sections, we discover how rewilding attunes us to a dynamic set of aesthetics and ontologies: the substrate and aerial, the ghosted and spectralised. Instead of mastering the unruly ‘wild patch’ of Jane’s wander through moorland wilderness, we wonder over it, even as it presses us into the present moment of ecological crisis. A tarrying with the strange, ludic rewilding has the potential to reactivate the dormant systems of even our most familiar literary objects.

This article constructively explores the emergence and development of realism in Victorian literature, particularly within the novel genre. It provides insight into the socio-political context of the period and discusses the creative methodologies utilized by influential writers like Charles Dickens, George Eliot and the Bronte sisters. By examining the transition from romantic to realist narrative modes, the study highlights the significant contributions of Victorian novels in portraying complex social realities and giving a voice to marginalized groups. Furthermore, it underscores how these works contributed to the moral and intellectual development of society. The paper also reflects on how the genre’s formal features, such as scope, character complexity, and length, effectively mirror the broader cultural transformations occurring in 19th-century Britain, fostering a deeper understanding of the literary landscape of the time.

Environmental Justice in Early Victorian Literature by Adrian Tait (review)

Abstract This research investigates the themes of artificiality and social alienation in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, examining how urban settings in Bath and Milton encapsulate the social complexities of Victorian society during the Industrial Revolution. Employing a comparative literary analysis, grounded in urban and social theory as articulated by experts such as Simmel and Parkins, this study highlights how city spaces both reflect and reinforce societal constraints and individual behaviours. Data was gathered through close readings of the primary texts, supported by secondary sources, and analysed to explore patterns of social interaction and urban influence on character development. The findings reveal how Bath’s societal superficiality shapes Catherine Morland’s experience, while Milton’s industrial harshness impacts characters like Margaret Hale and Mr. Thornton, illustrating the varied ways urban settings foster artificiality and exacerbate social divides. This research contributes to understanding Victorian literature's critique of societal structures, emphasizing the value of authenticity and human connection amid social pressures.

A Study on the Linguistic Adaptation of Language Modeling Techniques in Translating British Victorian Literature

Abstract This short article approaches intertextuality as a network, as a form of ‘reading with’ and in company which is inevitably complex, mediated and fragmentary. It takes as its primary example a chapter from George Eliot’s last novel Daniel Deronda (1876) in which Dante is explicitly present: on the one hand, as the words for a song from Gioachino Rossini’s opera Otello (1816); on the other, via a paraphrase by Alfred, Lord Tennyson placed as the chapter’s epigraph. This example confirms Caroline Levine’s argument about transnational ‘networks allow[ing] us to reconceive what is proper to Victorian literature’, so as to include Dante, for example (Levine, ‘From Nation to Network’, Victorian Studies, 55.4 (2013), 647–66 (p. 664)). Yet it also raises vital and even worrying questions about the canon as a network, about the presence and role of fragmentation and about an overreliance on authors and authorship.

In contrast to the popularity of working-class issues among mainstream Victorian writers, the voices of working-class writers who deal with the problems of their own social groups are not sufficiently heard and noticed in the 19th century Victorian literature. Remarkably, Janet Hamilton (1795-1873) is one of these un-canonized working-class writers who tackle the problems of factory workers and use writing as a political instrument of creating solidarity among the workers by provoking them to resist oppression and exploitation. This study takes Janet Hamilton’s “Poems, Essays, and Sketches” (1870) as its object of scrutiny to unravel her unwavering commitment to improving social and economic conditions of the working classes. The study will throw an additional light on Hamilton’s worthwhile struggle to become the spokesperson for the suppressed and silenced voices of working classes who were marginalized and alienated.

Through a mixed-methods lens that pairs computational sentiment analysis with historical literary criticism, this paper investigates the complex relationship between emotional expression and socio-cultural context in Victorian literature. Centralizing the inescapable theme of melancholy, the study analyzes a representative corpus of Victorian texts through modern text-mining techniques—namely, application of sentiment lexicons, tokenization, and normalization. The session explores some fundamental aspects of the spatial and temporal dynamics of melancholic expressions with the help of digital mapping tools, especially concerning Victorian London. On a qualitative level, close readings demonstrate the subtle narrative strategies employed in the work that elicit melancholy; on a quantitative level, statistically significant trends in sentiment distribution crucially track with important historical events and socio-political changes

Strict class, gender, and moral dictates defined the social structure of the (1837-1901) Victorian era. In this framework, gender roles, especially for women, were limiting and complicated. By comparing four of the major novels of the period, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, it examines representations of gender and power in Victorian literature. Through the focus on the patriarchal texts of the oppressed fighting against the status quo, this research explores how writers of the time reflected societal issues or challenged them outright, disrupting the same in subtle and overt forms and struggles. At the heart of this is the idea of the "New Woman," a disruption of tradition in the form of an intellectual and socially rebellious figure of the time who does not conform to gender roles. Using a feminist, poststructuralist , and queer lens, this study interrogates the representation and resistance of dominant gender roles and power structures. Examining key female and male characters from Jane Eyre and Dorothea Brooke to Tess Durbeyfield and Pip, the article identifies tropes of gendered independence, marriage, intellectual agency, and masculinity. The results, aside from being interesting at first sight, reveal the complicated role of Victorian literature in both upholding and subverting the values of the period, especially when it comes to women and the discourse surrounding autonomy and agency. In conclusion, this article shows that the cross-section between gender and power played out in Victorian fiction is equally reflective of the time shortly before their publication whilst remaining relevant critiques in ongoing conversations and debates about gender equality and autonomy today.

Victorian literature reflects the socio-economic and cultural norms of 19th-century England, where the lives of working women often remained overshadowed by dominant narratives of domesticity and idealized femininity. This paper examines the representation of working women in Victorian literature, focusing on their roles, struggles, and agency within the context of industrialization and class dynamics. By analyzing texts such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, this study uncovers the nuanced portrayal of laboring women. It explores themes such as economic exploitation, resilience, and societal prejudice while critiquing the marginalization of working-class women in literary discourse. The paper highlights the historical significance of these characters, advocating for a re-evaluation of their roles in shaping Victorian literature and its feminist interpretations.