Fiction

Varney the Vampyre, or, the Feast of Blood

Varney the Vampyre, or, the Feast of Blood: A Romance (1845-7) is one of the longest-running and most successful "penny bloods," or Victorian periodical serial fictions. Written primarily by James Malcolm Rymer, the creator of penny fiction villain Sweeney Todd, Varney is the missing link between John William Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). It established many lasting conventions of vampire literature and is an important precursor to the vampires of Silent Era American cinema.

The Brontes, Fall 2022

A madwoman in the attic, impassioned love, and a mysterious/abusive past.  Such sensational themes may seem ripped from today’s social media, but, in fact, they are the defining elements of the novels of the Brontë sisters. We will adopt new historicist and gender studies approaches to study arguably the greatest English literary family of the nineteenth century.

The Doom of the Great City

The Doom of the Great City

The Doom of the Great City

June, 2022

William Delisle Hay's The Doom of the Great City (1880) is relatively unknown today, even among scholars who specialize in Victorian literature. There is little scholarship on the novella, and it’s not commonly taught in high school or college classrooms. Our hope is that this critical edition will change that. Doom's engagement with nineteenth-century science, environmental concerns, and the post-apocalyptic genre lend it much relevancy in the twenty-first century.

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