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Cambridge Companions
Cambridge Companions include collections of introductory essays on aspects of writers, cultural topics, and time periods. Similarly, Oxford Handbook offer current thinking and research on authors and topics of possible interest. Some examples:
The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton by Call Number: Ebook (also available in print )ISBN: 9780521453585Publication Date: 1995
The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9780521871198Publication Date: 2009
The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein by Call Number: Ebook (also available in print)ISBN: 9781107086197Publication Date: 2016
The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (2nd ed) by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9781107193345Publication Date: 2019
The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction by Call Number: Ebook (also available in print)ISBN: 9780521791243Publication Date: 2002
The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley by Call Number: Ebook (also available in print)ISBN: 9780521809849Publication Date: 2003
The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy by Call Number: Ebook (also available in print)ISBN: 9780521562027Publication Date: 1999
The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Writing by Call Number: Ebook (also available in print)ISBN: 9781107587823Publication Date: 2015
The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9780198743415Publication Date: 2018
The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction by Call Number: Ebook (also available in print - check Virgo)ISBN: 9780199838844Publication Date: 2014-10-01
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Researching Speculative Fiction authors & their works
The resources on this guide will help you as you undertake research related to nineteenth-century speculative fiction. This page includes information for finding critical scholarship and biographical information. The other tabs in this guide include resources to research the reception history of works you have read in class, as well as guidance on citing works you use in your research papers and tools for making off-Grounds access to our resources easier.
Finding critical scholarship on works of speculative fiction - Library databases
The MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) indexes the broadest range of resources about literature in all languages. If a literary study of your novel or story exists, you will likely find it here. Not everything in the MLA Bibliography is full-text, meaning that you may only see a description of an article, rather than the text of the article. To get full text of an article, click on “Find article @ UVa Libraries”, or look up the journal title in Virgo, the library catalog. If the citation is for a book or an essay/chapter in a book, look for the book title in Virgo.
ProQuest One Literature contains 3 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, and dissertations. Choose the Criticism option to see literary articles, monographs, and critical reviews for your search. The database also includes more than 500,000 primary works – including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theatre performances, and author readings.
JSTOR includes older issues of scholarly journals, from their beginnings to 3-5 years ago, so this may be another good database to look for articles related to your story or novel. Articles in JSTOR should be full-text, if we subscribe to the journal.
Project MUSE includes searchable full text of nearly 600 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and more, mostly from North American university presses.
Finding critical scholarship on speculative fiction - print books and ebooks
Virgo is UVA Library's catalog. Search Virgo for scholarship about authors and their works. Use subject headings to help you find resources that meet your research needs. You can use a general subject to get started, like: Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan -- 1814-1873 -- Criticism and interpretation or Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft -- 1797-1851 -- Frankenstein (substitute author names or titles of other works to look for criticism on those).
You can also run a broader search for criticism on themes or topics from the course such as speculative fiction, Gothic fiction, ghost stories, and the like. Subject heading examples might include: Speculative fiction, English -- History and criticism, Supernatural in literature, Gothic revival (Literature), or Ghost stories, English -- History and criticism
Once you find a book that includes a subject heading that relates to your topic of interest, you may try clicking on that subject heading to find other items marked with that subject.
Below are a few examples of print books and ebooks that critically examine topics from the course.
Artificial Life after Frankenstein by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9780812252743Publication Date: 2020Artificial Life After Frankenstein brings the insights born of Mary Shelley's legacy to bear upon the ethics and politics of making artificial life and intelligence in the twenty-first century. What are the obligations of humanity to the artificial creatures we make? And what are the corresponding rights of those creatures, whether they are learning machines or genetically modified organisms? In seeking ways to respond to these questions, so vital for our age of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, we would do well to turn to the capacious mind and imaginative genius of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851). Shelley's novels Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and The Last Man (1826) precipitated a modern political strain of science fiction concerned with the ethical dilemmas that arise when we make artificial life--and make life artificial--through science, technology, and other forms of cultural change.
The Ghost Story 1840-1920: A Cultural History by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9780719074462Publication Date: 2010The Ghost Story 1840-1920: A Cultural History examines the British ghost story within the political contexts of the long nineteenth century. By relating the ghost story to economic, national, colonial and gendered contexts' it provides a critical re-evaluation of the period.The conjuring of a political discourse of spectrality during the nineteenth century enables a culturally sensitive reconsideration of the work of writers including Dickens, Collins, Charlotte Riddell, Vernon Lee, May Sinclair, Kipling, Le Fanu, Henry James and M.R. James. Additionally, a chapter on the interpretation of spirit messages reveals how issues relating to textual analysis were implicated within a language of the spectral. This book is the first full-length study of the British ghost story in over 30 years and it will be of interest to academics, graduate students and advanced undergraduates working on the Gothic, literary studies, historical studies, critical theory and cultural studies.
The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9781000915433Publication Date: 2023The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction explores the ways in which the Arctic is imagined and what function it is made to serve in a selection of speculative fictions: non-mimetic works that start from the implied question "What if?" Spanning slightly more than two centuries of speculative fiction, from the starting point in Mary Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein to contemporary works that engage with the vast ramifications of anthropogenic climate change, analyses demonstrate how Arctic discourses are supported or subverted and how new Arctics are added to the textual tradition. To illuminate wider lines of inquiry informing the way the world is envisioned, humanity's place and function in it, and more-than-human entanglements, analyses focus on the function of the actual Arctic and how this function impacts and is impacted by speculative elements. With effects of climate change training the global eye on the Arctic, and as debates around future northern cultural, economic and environmental sustainability intensify, there is a need for a deepened understanding of the discourses that have constructed and are constructing the Arctic. A careful mapping and serious consideration of both past and contemporary speculative visions thus illuminate the role the Arctic has played and may come to play in a diverse set of practices and fields.
Labyrinths of Deceit: Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9780853238492Publication Date: 2008Prominent citizens in nineteenth-century England believed themselves to be living in a time of unstoppable progress. Yet running just beneath Victorian triumphalism were strong undercurrents of chaos and uncertainty. Richard Walker plumbs the depths of those currents in order to present an alternative history of nineteenth-century society. Mining literary and philosophical works of the period, Walker explores the crisis of identity that beset nineteenth-century thinkers and how that crisis revealed itself in portrayals of addiction, split personalities, and religious mania. Victorian England will never look the same.
Margaret Oliphant: Critical Essays on a Gentle Subversive by Call Number: Shannon PR5114.M37 1995ISBN: 9780945636724Publication Date: 1995In her day, Margaret Oliphant was called the greatest living Scottish woman of letters. She was compared favorably to Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope, held a leading position as reviewer for the venerable Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for nearly fifty years, and wrote an astonishing number of books and articles that were prodigious even by Victorian standards: ninety-eight novels, several dozen short stories, more than five hundred critical, biographical, or occasional articles, and several additional volumes of biography, history, and literary history. Yet shortly after her death in 1897, most of her books went out of print and her reputation declined precipitously. Very little was published on her for over eighty years, with a modest re-evaluation of her life and oeuvre beginning in the last three decades. This is the first collection of essays ever devoted to Oliphant. It pays her the compliment of taking her seriously as an artist and seeks to evaluate her major works and beliefs rather than rely on misguided characterizations of her life and writing. It seeks to suggest future lines of research as it analyzes the best of her published work. This collection considers her unusually experimental Autobiography, her major works of fiction, which were often highly subversive of established literary practice or conventions, her highly misunderstood stand on the Woman
The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9783030408657Publication Date: 2021By the early 1830s the old school of Gothic literature was exhausted. Late Romanticism, emphasising as it did the uncertainties of personality and imagination, gave it a new lease of life. Gothic--the literature of disturbance and uncertainty--now produced works that reflected domestic fears, sexual crimes, drug filled hallucinations: the terrible secrets of middle class marriage, imperial horror at alien invasion, occult demonism and the insanity of psychopaths. It was from the 1830s onwards that the old gothic castle gave way to the country house drawing room, the dungeon was displaced by the sewers of the city and the villains of early novels became the familiar figures of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, Dorian Grey and Jack the Ripper. After the death of Prince Albert (1861), the Gothic became darker, more morbid, obsessed with demonic lovers, blood sucking ghouls, blood stained murderers and deranged doctors. Whilst the gothic architecture of the Houses of Parliament and the new Puginesque churches upheld a Victorian ideal of sobriety, Christianity and imperial destiny, Gothic literature filed these new spaces with a dread that spread like a plague to America, France, Germany and even Russia. From 1830 to 1914, the period covered by this volume, we saw the emergence of the greats of Gothic literature and the supernatural from Edgar Allan Poe to Emily Bronte, from Sheridan Le Fanu to Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson.
The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9781315644417Publication Date: 2017This Handbook to the Ghost Story sets out to survey and significantly extend a new field of criticism which has been taking shape over recent years, centering on the ghost story and bringing together a vast range of interpretive methods and theoretical perspectives. The main task of the volume is to properly situate the genre within historical and contemporary literary cultures across the globe, and to explore its significance within wider literary contexts as well as those of the supernatural.
Spirits and Spirituality in Victorian Fiction by Call Number: Shannon PR878 .S85 C33 2016ISBN: 9781137559920Publication Date: 2016As seen in fiction, newspaper accounts, and magic shows, the presence of ghosts pervaded the Victorian period. This book examines supernatural encounters in a wide range of Victorian writers including Dickens and Kipling. Cadwallader argues that these fictional spirits reflect how Victorians were adapting to rapid scientific and religious changes.
The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9781003173083Publication Date: 2022Against the social and economic upheavals that characterized the nineteenth century, the border-bending Nosferatu embodied the period's fears as well as its forbidden desires. This volume looks at both the range among and legacy of vampires in the nineteenth century, including race, culture, social upheaval, gender and sexuality, new knowledge and technology. The figure increased in popularity throughout the century and reached its climax in Dracula (1897), the most famous story of bloodsuckers. This book includes chapters on Bram Stoker's iconic novel, as well as touchstone texts like John William Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) and Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872), but it also focuses on the many "Other" vampire stories of the period. Topics discussed include: the long-war veteran and aristocratic vampire in Varney; the vampire as addict in fiction by George MacDonald; time discipline in Eric Stenbock's Studies of Death; fragile female vampires in works by Eliza Lynn Linton; the gender and sexual contract in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's "Good Lady Ducayne;" cultural appropriation in Richard Burton's Vikram and the Vampire; as well as Caribbean vampires and the racialized Other in Florence Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire. While drawing attention to oft-overlooked stories, this study ultimately highlights the vampire as a cultural shape-shifter whose role as "Other" tells us much about Victorian culture and readers' fears or desires.
Finding biographical information about authors
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) provides entries on the lives of British persons from the earliest times to the end of the 20th century. IMPORTANT: our access is limited so please click the Sign Out link at the bottom of the page and close the window when you are finished.
Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles provides entries on authors' lives and writing careers, contextual material, timelines, sets of internal links, and bibliographies. Interacting with these materials creates a dynamic inquiry from any number of perspectives into centuries of women's writing.
Literature Resource Center (LRC) includes the full text of important literary reference works. Among them are articles from the Dictionary of Literary Biography, which is a terrific source for finding detailed biographies and profiles of authors, illustrators, publishers, and other literary figures. Run a search for a person's name and then choose the Biographies tab, if there are articles available (though other articles - critical or otherwise -- could be useful, too!)
There are also book-length works on most of the authors you'll be reading in the course. A few examples:
In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein by Call Number: Shannon PR5398 .S25 2018ISBN: 1781255288Publication Date: 2018
Mrs Oliphant: "a Fiction to Herself" by Call Number: Shannon PR5114.J39 1995ISBN: 9780198128755Publication Date: 1995
Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography by Call Number: Shannon PR5493.H37 2005ISBN: 9780007113217Publication Date: 2005
Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland by Call Number: Shannon PR4879.L7 Z77ISBN: 9780198126294Publication Date: 1980
Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography by Call Number: Ebook (also available in print - check Virgo)ISBN: 9780813921587Publication Date: 2003
