Anthony Trollope's Late Style

Exploring Anthony Trollope's stylistic innovations in relation to Victorian liberalism Henry James famously dismissed the works which constitute Anthony Trollope's ultimate compositions for their 'fatal dryness of texture' and 'mechanical movement'. Taking its cue from James's observations while challenging his assessment, this study examines the full stylistic range of the novels and biographies which Trollope explored in his final decade, from allegory, satire, and parody, through poignancy, the classics, and paraphrasis, to character, bathos, and fantasy. Blending literary criticism with intellectual history and Frankfurt School theory, Frederik Van Dam shows how Trollope's creation of this new, impersonal aesthetic was driven by a desire to intervene in contemporary debates on topics such as suburban sociability and marginalist economics, colonialism and national sovereignty, educational and jurisprudential reforms. Key features - Presents a stylistic analysis of a major Victorian novelist - Reads Victorian literature through the lens of German Romanticism - Presents a panorama of Victorian intellectual debates on colonialism, economics, nationalism, the classics, pedagogy, legal reform, and urban sociability - Examines the writings from the last decade of Trollope's life that have received only scant critical attention, such as his novellas and his biographies

Frederik Van Dam is Assistant Professor of European Literature at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is the author of Anthony Trollope's Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form (EUP, 2016) and has recently edited a special issue on literature and economics in the European Journal of English Studies (2017). He is currently working on a literary history of diplomacy from the Congress of Vienna up to the present.