Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns: Essays on Fiction and Culture

This collection has been brought together in honour of Margaret Harris, Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney (2006-7), and the holder of a personal chair in Victorian Literature and Biography. The essays collected here reflect the richness of her research. Her published contributions to Victorian studies alone include two important scholarly editions of primary material by George Eliot and George Meredith; editions of novels by George Eliot, George Meredith, and Arnold Bennett; and essays in major reference works such as the 'Oxford Dictionary of National Biography' and 'Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot', among others. Her published articles reveal her own scholarly turns and returns, at one time focusing on the journals of George Eliot, at another investigating stage and screen adaptations of the work of Eliot, Gaskell, and other Victorian novelists. Current projects include a major study of the lives and afterlives of the pseudonym "George Eliot" and editing 'George Eliot in Context' for Cambridge University Press. Not included here, but an important scholarly contribution, is her extensive publishing in Australian literature, including key women writers of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Margaret Harris taught in the English Department at the University of Sydney from 1969 to 2007. Several of her former students, now distinguished academics themselves, have contributed to this book. Along with them, her Australian and international colleagues offer a collection of essays that represents the diversity of Victorian studies as they have developed over the period covered by Professor Harris's career. While seeing literature as central, these scholars bring to bear on it the new perspectives created by a deeper awareness of the cultural context-in particular, dynamic social and technological change-and by the rich, continuing impetus towards the recycling and re-shaping of Victorian literature in modern culture.