Overview

The Victorian illustrated book came into being, flourished, and evolved during the nineteenth century. Catherine Golden offers a new framework for viewing the arc of this vibrant form and surveys the fluidity in styles of illustration in serial instalments, British and American periodicals, adult and children's literature, and - more recently - graphic novels. Golden examines widely recognized illustrated texts, such as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Rabbit, and finds new expressions of this traditional genre in present-day graphic novel adaptations of the works of Austen, Dickens, and Trollope, as well as Neo-Victorian graphic novels like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. She explores the various factors that contributed to the early popularity of the illustrated book - the growth of commodity culture, a rise in literacy, new printing technologies - and how these ultimately created a mass market for new fiction. While existing scholarship on Victorian illustrators largely centres on the Household Edition of Dickens or the realist artists of the ""Sixties"", notably Fred Barnard and John Tenniel, this volume examines the lifetime of the Victorian illustrated book. It also discusses how a particular canon has been refashioned and repurposed for new generations of readers.

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9780813064987

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Reviews

A well-researched and well-written overview of the development of the Victorian illustrated book, illuminating an under-studied area of scholarship and pointing to intriguing connections between Victorian illustrated books and contemporary graphic narratives. . . . Exceptionally insightful. --English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 Rich scholarship and extensive illustrated materials. --Victorian Periodicals Review Generously illustrated and highly informative. . . . The virtue of Golden's book is its wide scope, from eighteenth-century artists such as William Hogarth to recent developments in the graphic novel. --Dickens Quarterly A significant contribution to the scholarly literature on a phenomenon of exceptional interest in a transformative era in art and society. --Nineteenth-Century Contexts

A well-researched and well-written overview of the development of the Victorian illustrated book, illuminating an under-studied area of scholarship and pointing to intriguing connections between Victorian illustrated books and contemporary graphic narratives. . . . Exceptionally insightful. --English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 Generously illustrated and highly informative. . . . The virtue of Golden's book is its wide scope, from eighteenth-century artists such as William Hogarth to recent developments in the graphic novel. --Dickens Quarterly A significant contribution to the scholarly literature on a phenomenon of exceptional interest in a transformative era in art and society. --Nineteenth-Century Contexts

Author Information

Catherine J. Golden, professor of English and the Tisch Chair in Arts and Letters at Skidmore College, is the author of numerous books, including Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing.

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