Because of seminal works like Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1955), Roger Caillois's Man, Play, and Games (1961) and R. Rawdon Wilson's In Palamedes' Shadow: Explorations in Play, Game, and Narrative Theory (1990), there has been, in recent years, a growing interest among scholars in the history and theory of games in literature and culture. The articles below represent some of the work that is being done in the area of Games in Victorian Fiction.
Bivona, Daniel. "Alice the Child-Imperialist and the Games of Wonderland." Nineteenth-Century Literature 41:2 (1986): 143-71.
Blake, Kathleen. Play, Games, and Sport: The Literary Works of Lewis Carroll. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1974.
Cordery, G. "The Gambling Grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop." Literature and Psychology 33:1 (1987): 43-61.
Crutch, Denis. "Through the Looking-Glass: Some Hints for Travellers From a Lecture Delivered to the Society by Mr. Denis Crutch." Jabberwocky (1972): 1-3.
Davies, Ivor. "Looking-Glass Chess." The Anglo-Welsh Review (1970): 189-91.
Dickins, A. S. M. "Alice in Fairyland." Jabberwocky 5 (1976): 3-24.
Ekeblad, Inga-Stinga. "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Women Beware Women." Notes and Queries 10 (1963): 449-50.
Forsyte, Charles. "Children's Games in Edwin Drood." Notes and Queries 34:1 (1987): 43-46.
Franklin, J. Jeffrey. "The Victorian Discourse of Gambling: Speculations on Middlemarch and The Duke's Children." ELH 61:4 (1994): 899-921.
Hennelly, Mark M. "`The Games of the Prison Children' in Dickens's Little Dorrit." Nineteenth-Century Contexts 20:2 (1997): 187-213.
---. "Dickens's Praise of Folly: Play in The Pickwick Papers." Dickens Quarterly 3:1 (1986): 27-46.
---. "Carnivalesque `Unlawful Games' in The Old Curiosity Shop." Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 22 (1993): 67-120.
Martin, Alastair. "Sports and Games in the Canon." The Baker Street Journal: An Irregular Quarterly of Sherlockiana 31:4 (1981): 198-99.
McCusker, Jane A. "The Games Esther Plays: Chapter Three of Bleak House." The Dickensian 81:3 (1985): 163-74.
Morrow, Nancy. Dreadful Games: The Play of Desire in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Kent: Kent State UP, 1988.
Nadel, Ira Bruce. "`The Mansion of Bliss,' or the Place of Play in Victorian Life and Literature." Children's Literature 10 (1982): 18-36.
Rimmer, Mary. "Club Laws: Chess and the Construction of Gender in A Pair of Blue Eyes." The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy. Ed. Margaret R. Higonnet. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993. 203-20.
Sirabian, Robert H. "Playing Play and Games: Structure and Meaning in the Novels of Charles Dickens." DAI 55:12 (1994): 3855A.
Stone, Winifred. "The Play of Chance and Ego in Daniel Deronda." Nineteenth-Century Literature 53:1 (1998): 25-55.
Zemka, Sue. "From the Punchmen to Pugin's Gothics: The Broad Road to a Sentimental Death in The Old Curiosity Shop." Nineteenth-Century Literature 48:3 (1993): 291-309.
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