Rethinking Victorian Culture

The Victorian period witnessed a fundamental reassessment of the very concept of culture. Cultural theorists from Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy to Raymond Williams in Culture and Society have acknowledged the importance of the Victorian period in the history of culture. More recently, however, the rise of cultural studies has signalled a particular intensity of interest in twentieth-century cultural history and theory. Rethinking Victorian Culture is predicated on the view that the histories of Victorian and modern culture form a continuous narrative." "Original essays by eminent and emerging Victorianists re-evaluate Victorian culture using a variety of different critical and theoretical approaches. As importantly, the collection offers a reassessment, explicit and implicit, of Victorian studies and its methodologies