Bram Stoker followed the lead set by Robert Louis Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) to write horror fiction. Such stories were enjoying a renewed prestige among the French, and Stevenson proved that modern… Read More ›
Novel Analysis
Domestic Realism
A fiction subgenre of a realistic nature that focuses on the home scene, domestic realism evolved from the reaction against Romanticism that occurred in the mid-19th century. Following the preoccupation of the Romantic writers (1789–1837) with the superiority of intuition… Read More ›
Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son
Charles Dickens’s seventh novel, first published in 20 serial parts between October 1846 and April 1848 with the complete title Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Retail, Wholesale, and for Exploration, marked what many critics agree to be… Read More ›
Analysis of Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne
Anthony Trollope produced the best-selling novel of its time in this, the third book in his Barsetshire sequence, Doctor Thorne, published in three volumes. He departed from his normal village setting in this novel to consider county characters, focusing on… Read More ›
Analysis of Mary Brunton’s Discipline
Like her first novel, Self Control (1810), Mary Brunton’s second novel, Discipline, remains most important for its contribution to the development of silver-fork fiction and the manners novel, later made most famous by Jane Austen. Didactic in nature, the novel… Read More ›
Didactic Literature
Didactic literature, from the Greek didaktikos, or skillful in teaching, refers to literature that overtly demonstrates a truth or offers a lesson to readers. Not a subtle approach, didacticism delivers a specific and pointed message and was present in the… Read More ›
Analysis of George Meredith Diana of the Crossways
When George Meredith published his 1885 novel, Diana of the Crossways, women readers welcomed his heroine as representative of recent social reforms. The novel reflects its era’s obsessive interest in the breakdown of standards, which had been part of a… Read More ›
Analysis of George Gissing’s Demos: A Story of English Socialism
Reflective of his general focus on hard work as an anecdote to failure and poverty, George Gissing’s Demos: A Story of English Socialism blasts socialism as an ideal never to be realized, due to the greed of its leaders. He… Read More ›
Analysis of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield
In his novel David Copperfield, Charles Dickens produced his own favorite work and the favorite of many of his readers. He had honed his style through previous novels, and David Copperfield reflects his mature skill, partially accounting for the novel’s… Read More ›
Analysis of Mona Caird’s Daughters of Danaus
Mona Caird revealed her strong feminist leanings in all her writings, both fiction and nonfiction. Her 1894 novel, Daughters of Danaus, contained all the themes she stressed in her essays, including a need for female independence, both physical and emotional,… Read More ›
Analysis of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda
The last of George Eliot’s seven novels, published in eight parts between February and September 1876, Daniel Deronda has a double structure that follows two protagonists, Daniel Deronda and Gwendolyn Harleth, in their intertwined search for self-fulfillment. Eliot breaks new… Read More ›
Analysis of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race
In Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel, The Coming Race, later classified as science fiction, the author writes a futuristic novel that complemented his historical fiction. In this plot, often considered a satire on Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, an American mining engineer… Read More ›
Analysis of Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth
Charles Reade’s popular historical romance, The Cloister and the Hearth: A Tale of the Middle Ages, represented the labor of two years. Reade was hired in 1859 by the publishers of Once a Week to help that periodical compete with… Read More ›
Analysis of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa
Samuel Richardson published his second novel in seven volumes, the first two in 1747, and the remaining five the next year. Like his first work, Pamela (1740), Clarissa is an epistolary novel, made up of letters written between characters. While… Read More ›
Analysis of Charles Reade’s Christie Johnstone
While not considered among Charles Reade’s major works, Christie Johnstone provides a delightful insight into his sense of humor. Not only does the novel’s subject matter entertain, but its format also proves of interest, as Reade designed some chapters as… Read More ›
Chivalry
The word chivalry derives from the French term cheval, or horse, and those practicing chivalry in medieval times possessed highly developed horseback-riding skills. Dressed in armor during times of battle and known as knights, from a term that originally meant… Read More ›
Analysis of William Hale White’s Catherine Furz
William Hale White first fictionalized his attempts to escape his childhood’s Calvinistic training by writing an autobiography under the name of Mark Rutherford. He later used his own name when he published another serious exploration of the conflict caused by… Read More ›
Analysis of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent
Maria Edgeworth broke new narrative ground with her 1800 novel, Castle Rackrent. While her methodology of developing an imaginary hero who writes a memoir “edited” by an author had been popular since Robinson Crusoe (1719), she developed a new approach… Read More ›
Analysis of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto proved crucial to the development of Gothic fiction. As indicated by the book’s subtitle, Walpole (1717–97) designed it to provide readers with a romance incorporating a dark, moody villain, an endangered heroine, a hero… Read More ›
Analysis of Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?
Serialized between January 1864 and August 1865, Anthony Trollope’s first in his Palliser series, Can You Forgive Her? proved instantly popular. Based on reworked material from his failed comedy The Noble Jilt, its plot focuses on Victorian discontent with social… Read More ›
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