General Topics

• Poetry
• Fiction: Themes and Techniques
• Forms of the Novel and Short Story
• Nonfiction
• Literary Modes

Genre and Style: Poetry

• Aesthetic Sense and Personal Sensibility in Nineteenth-Century Poetic Style
• The Dramatic Monologue
• First-person narrators, the dramatic monologue, and problems of interpretation
• The Victorian Long Poem
• The Epic
• How to Read a Poem

Fiction (1): Its Component Themes and Techniques

• Introduction: How to read a novel
• Fictional Genres
• The Victorian Short Story: A Brief History
• Why Read the Serial Versions of Victorian Novels?
• Victorian Bestsellers, 1837-61
• “Nothing New” — Fake News, the Death of the Novel, and Information Technology
• Nostalgia and the Victorian Novel
• Characterization
• Introduction
• Aristotle on characterization
• "Gone are the men and women of Dickens": Changing Ideas of Characterization of Fiction
• "Border Crossings": A Review of Claudia Nelson's Precocious Children & Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature
• The family-systems approach
• Imagery, Symbol, and Motif
• Plot and Narrative Structure
• Narrative "Annexes" in Victorian Fiction
• The Flashback
• The Problem with First-person Narration
• First-Person Narration in Major Novels: A List
• Victorian and Modrn Endings
• The protagonist
  • Aristotle's definition of a protagonist
  • Carl Jung's Theory of the Effective Protagonist
• Plot versus Structure
• Setting
• Forms of Conflict
• [See also Pathetic Fallacy and Word-Painting above.]

Literary Modes

• Autobiography
• Allegory
• Children's Literature
• Ghost Stories
• Comedy
  • Through Bergson's Looking-Glass: Henry Bergson's Theory of Comedy and the Alice Books
  • The Dandy in The Picture of Dorian Gray: Towards an Archetypal Theory of Comedy and Wit
• Fantasy
• The Grotesque
• Melodrama
• Introduction
• Meldodrama, Sensation, and Tragedy in Hardy's Novels
• Melodrama and Theatricalized Dissent
• Realism
  • Introduction
  • Philip V. Allingham's Review of Harry E. Shaw's Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, and Eliot
  • Realism and the Outer Life
  • Realism in Austen's Northanger Abbey
  • Eliot's Realism and Nineteenth-Century Historicism
• Satire
• Suspense
• Sublimity

Genre and Style: Nonfiction

• General
• "Shooting the Agate": Fine Prose and Nonfiction
• Autobiography (sitemap)
• The Essay
• Lee Erickson on Literature, the Marketplace, and the Changing Fortunes of the Nineteenth-Century Essay
• The Objective Style, the Modest Witness, and Scientific Writing
• Letters to the Editor
  • Defending the Cultural Margins in 1860, or Drummed out of the Indian Army: The Case of Lt. Kennedy
• Sage Writing
• Introduction
• The Prophetic Pattern
• Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory: A Brief Introduction
• Wisdom literature