Pater to Forster, 1873-1924

by Ruth Robbins

Was the late nineteenth century 'Victorian' or 'modern'? Why did the New Woman disappear from literary history? Where did T. S. Eliot's poetics of the city come from?

In this essential guide, Ruth Robbins explores an era often named an 'age of transition' which exists uneasily between the apparent certainties of the Victorians and the advent of a Modernist aesthetics of instability. Robbins considers some of the central literary categories and themes of the period (decadence, realism, nostalgia, New Woman writing, degeneration, imperialism and early modernism) in writings by both major and 'minor' writers, thereby creating a complex picture of transitions, continuities and breaks with the past. By examining this tumultuous era as an age in its own right, Pater to Forster, 1873-1924 offers the reader a rather different history of the late Victorians and Modernists, and retells that history from a new perspective.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published July 17, 2003

About the author

Ruth Robbins is Professor of English Literature and head of the School of Cultural Studies and Humanities. Her work has focused on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, on autobiography, on literary theory and on particular writers such as Oscar Wilde and Arnold Bennett.

Ruth's research interests centre on the late-Victorian period in English literature, especially the literature of Decadence, and include the writings of Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Vernon Lee - her book Pater to Forster, 1873-1924 (2003) deals with literature written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century period. Her recent book Oscar Wilde (2011) revisits her interests in the fin de siècle; additionally she is co-author of a book on the British Short Story (with Emma Liggins and Andrew Maunder, 2010).

She also has research interests in literary theory