Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is a passionate defense of Victorian literature's enduring impact and importance for readers interested in the relationship between literature and life, reading and thinking.

• Explores the prominence of Victorian literature for contemporary readers and academics, through the author's unique insight into why it is still important today
• Provides new frames of interpretation for key Victorian works of literature and close readings of important texts
• Argues for a new engagement with Victorian literature, from general readers and scholars alike
• Seeks to remove Victorian literature from an entrenched set of values, traditions and perspectives - demonstrating how vital and resonant it is for modern literary and cultural analysis

About the Author
Philip Davis is Professor of English Literature in the School of English, University of Liverpool, UK. He is the author of The Victorians and, most recently, Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life. His other books include The Experience of Reading; Real Voices: On Reading, and Memory and Writing: from Wordsworth to Lawrence, as well as works on Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson. He is also editor of The Reader, a non-academic literary magazine aimed at the serious reader.

Reviews
"Philip Davis's Blackwell manifesto offers a spirited, polemical defence of Victorian literature in general, and Victorian realism in particular, against its modernist and postmodernist detractors." (Oxford Journals, 1 June 2011)

"In Why Victorian Literature Still Matters, Davis writes as a reader. Readers, as he defines them, are different from scholars and critics. Who distance themselves from the worlds before them by turning to history or theory instead. Readers, by contrast, do not distance themselves at all, but rather seek ever more closeness." (Victorian Studies, Winter 2010)"Philip Davis's [book] ... Was fascinating about Victorian writing, and one of the best books written about how novels can work." (The Guardian, November 2008)

Book Information
ISBN 9781405135795
Author Philip Davis
Format Paperback
Page Count 184
Imprint Wiley-Blackwell
Publisher John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Weight(grams) 290g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 15mm