A major contribution to the cultural and literary history of the Victorian age, this book maps the complex relationship between Victorian literary forms, genres, and theories and imperialist, racist ideology.

Who killed Shakespeare? asks the world outside the university, convinced that something’s rotten in the state of academia. Have English professors really tossed out the Bard to take up theory…

Brantlinger shows how the belief in the historical inevitability of social decay-a belief today perpetuated by the mass media themselves-has become the dominant view of mass culture in our time.

Focuses on the many ways in which novels and novel reading were viewed - especially by novelists themselves - as both causes and symptoms of rotting minds and moral decay…

The literary presence of Harriet Martineau pervades 19th-century English and American culture