Using major social change as its starting point, "Victorian Literature" explores how all forms of literary discourse were changed and exposed between 1830 and 1900 by new methods of serialization, the increasing complexity of new contexts of consumption, and a pervasive culture of performance. The detailed readings include Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Bram Stoker; and poets such as Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti. Each chapter introduces key critical concepts such as 'realism', genres such as the dramatic monologue and 'sensation fiction', and areas of debate such as the relationship between science and literature, and women and writing.