The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate.

This volume opens up, in new and innovative ways, a range of dimensions, some familiar and some more obscure, of late Victorian and modern literature and culture, primarily in British contexts. Late Victorian into Modern emphasizes the in-between: the gradual changeover from one period to the next. The volume examines shared developments, points out continuities rather than ruptures, and explores and exploits an understanding of the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries as a cultural moment in which new knowledges were forming with particular speed and intensity. The organizing principle of this book is to retain a key focus on literary texts, broadly understood to include familiar categories of genre as well as extra-textual elements such as press and publishing history, performance events and visual culture, while remaining keenly attentive to the inter-relations between text and context in the period. Individual chapters explore such topics as Celticism, the New Woman, popular fictions, literatures of empire, aestheticism, periodical culture, political formations, avant-garde poetics, and theatricality.

Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths' Professor of English at the University of Oxford, where she is a Professorial Fellow of New College. Her book publications include Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice, Virginia Woolf: Writers and their Work, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period, which was awarded the 2008 James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association, Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema, and, as co-editor, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature. Her current research project includes a study of the concept of 'rhythm' in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a range of disciplinary contexts.

Michele Mendelssohn is Associate Professor at University of Oxford and Deputy Director of the Rothermere American Institute. She is the author of Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Aesthetic Culture and co-editor of Alan Hollinghurst: Writing Under the Influence.

Kirsten Shepherd-Barr is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Catherine's College. Her books include Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen, Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett, and Modern Drama: A Very Short Introduction.

Introduction
Twilights
1. Medievalism and Modernity, Marcus Waithe
2. Mythology, Empire, and Narrative, Jarad Zimbler
3. Death Drives: Biology, Decadence, and Psychoanalysis, Stefano Evangelista
4. Celticism, Daniel Williams
Making it New
5. Cultures of the Avant-Garde, Christos Hadjiyiannis
6. Hannah Sullivan, Hannah Sullivan
7. When was Modernism?, Michael H. Whitworth
8. What was the 'New Drama'?, Sos Eltis and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr
9. Who was the New Woman?, Angelique Richardson
10. Utopian Thought and the Way to Live Now, Anne Fernihough
Modes and Genres
11. Naturalism, Realism, and Impressionism, Adam Parkes
12. Naturalism, Realism, and Impressionism, Adrian Hunter
13. Moon Voyaging, Selenography and the Scientific Romance, Matthew Taunton
14. Super-niches?: Detection, Adventure, Exploration and Spy Stories, David Glover
Sites and Spaces of Knowledge
15. Scientific Formations, Rachel Crossland
16. Spirit Worlds, Tatiana Kontou
17. Cityscapes, Laurence Scott
18. Regionalisms, Penny Fielding
19. The View from Empire: the Turn-of-the-Century Globalizing World, Elleke Boehmer
Minds and Bodies
20. Race and Biology, William Greenslade
21. The Will to Forget: Amnesia, the Nation, and Ulysses, Vincent J. Cheng
22. The Posthuman Spirit of the Neo-Pagan Movement, Dennis Denisoff
23. Theatre and the Sciences of Mind, Tiffany Watt-Smith
24. The Theatre of Hands: Writing the First World War, Santanu Das
25. Children's Literature and Literatures of Childhood, Marah Gubar
26. Intersexions: Dandyism, Cross-Dressing, Transgender, Jana Funke
Political and Social Selves
27. Political Formations: Anarchism, Feminism, Socialism, Ruth Livesey
28. 'The End of Laissez-Faire': Literature, Economics, and the Idea of the Welfare State, Benjamin Kohlmann
29. Representing Work, Sos Eltis
Authorship, Aesthetics, and Print Cultures
30. Reading Aestheticism, Decadence, and Cosmopolitanism, Michele Mendelssohn
31. Parodies, Spoofs, and Satires, James Williams
32. Life-Writing: Biography, Portraits and Self-portraits, Masked Authorship and Autobiografictions, Max Saunders
33. Journalism and Periodical Culture, Faith Binckes
34. The Illustrated Book, Kamilla Elliott
Technologies
35. The Coming of Cinema, Laura Marcus
36. Literature and Photography, Kate Flint
37. Electricity, Telephony, and Communications, Sam Halliday
38. The Residue of Modernity: Technology, Anachronism, and Bric-a-Brac in India, Alexander Bubb
39. Stagecraft: Puppets, Masks, and Machines, Olga Taxidou