Victorian Studies

The years 1840-1870 represent a period of rapid educational and ecclesiastical growth in England. This essay will illustrate how personal factors interlocked with institutional and national factors to produce both opportunity and crisis at Rossall School in the decades after its foundation in 1844. In addition to use of leading secondary sources, the essay uses primary sources including local newspaper reports and the archives at Rossall School, Manchester Cathedral and Cambridge University to investigate the development of and resolution of an issue that became acute in 1862

K.J. James examines linen handloom weavers as they encountered significant changes in the industry, and explores fluctuating definitions of men's and women's work in the trade. Using a case study of mid-Antrim's rural weavers, this book explores sexual divisions of labour, the gendering of skill, and work strategies in weaving households as it analyzes the persistence of hand production in Ireland's main textile sector. This work advances the study of hand producers in Irish industry, whose diverse experiences have been neglected in favour of urban factory labour in the study of the post-Famine Irish linen industry.

This book examines the role of epistolary forms in neo-Victorian fiction. It demonstrates that letters and diaries and other embedded documents are a predominant feature in contemporary fiction that rewrites the nineteenth century for a neo-Victorian audience. Writers creatively use documents in strategic ways that prove emblematic of the metacritical experimentation which characterises neo-Victorianism. Critically aware novelists like Margaret Atwood, A. S. Byatt, Michel Faber, Mick Jackson, Melissa Pritchard, Katie Roiphe, and Sarah Waters embrace the metafictional aspects of epistolary to manipulate writer, reader, and addressee situations by way of interpolated documents in fiction. These foreground a degree of writerly authority from within the text and also place emphasis on the reader’s role in decoding the narrative. Imagined fragmentary, incomplete, and contradictory material traces organise conflicting and unreliable viewpoints within fiction to raise postmodern debates about the problems and contingencies of knowing the documented past.