• The nineteenth-century present
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The nineteenth-century present

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This collection explores how a range of nineteenth-century authors, from their own historically contingent perspectives, were concerned with many of the same issues as scholars today looking back a...
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  • 29 July 2025
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The Nineteenth-Century Present explores the multiple ways in which history was understood, structured, and reassessed in literary, theological, and political contexts across the nineteenth century. While the scope of the book is wide, ranging from the representations of geological time and ancient history to the writing of the recent past, and covering the work of writers from Walter Scott to G.K. Chesterton, each chapter reveals how present concerns intrude on and shape every view of history. Ultimately, the collection emphasises that issues raised regarding historicity in recent methodological debates were already concerns in the nineteenth century.
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Price: £90.00
Pages: 298
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century
Publication Date: 29 July 2025
ISBN: 9781526172365
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:

LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literature: history and criticism
REVIEWS Icon

Introduction: Writing (about) history in the nineteenth century – Elizabeth Ludlow and Koenraad Claes
Part I: The historicisms of geology, biology, and culture
1 Storied matter and human entanglements: A new materialist exploration of Thomas Hardy’s settings – Hilary Bedder
2 Cultural evolution and the spirit of civilization in Charles Kingsley’s and Grant Allen’s speculative history writing – Will Abberley
Part II: Structuring political history
3 Edmund Burke, Jane West, Walter Scott and the trope of the Unevent in Romantic-Era Conservatism – Koenraad Claes
4 Feeling medieval: Sensing political spirits through art and architecture in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows and William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball – Natalie Hanna
5 Proletarian history in Red Republican ‘Mysteries’ and historical narratives – Stephen Basdeo
Part III: Generations and dynasties
6 From Victoria and Albert to Harry and Meghan: royal couples in the grip of mass media – Marysa Demoor
7 The importance of birth dates: G.K. Chesterton, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and the age of the Edwardians – Martin Hewitt
Part IV: Tractarian ethos and historiography
8 Tractarian historiographies and primitive theologies – Lesa Scholl
9 Agency and female character in the historical novels of Charlotte M. Yonge: the example of The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest – Gavin Budge
Part V: Religious history and personal experience
10 John Henry Newman’s ‘historical sense’ – Rebekah Lamb
11 Josephine Butler’s reconsideration of female saints: eschatological conceptions of history and the dismantling of structural evil – Elizabeth Ludlow
12 Apocalypse not quite yet: waiting for the end in mid-Victorian literature – Simon Marsden
Index