Six critics consider what is significantly not present or at least significantly well hidden in a provocative examination of the cultural anxieties that the nineteenth-century novel manipulates and conceals.
Probing the connections between literary and sexual politics, the authors question the absence of the police from
Barchester Towers
and the presence of homoeroticism in "The Beast in the Jungle." They consider the Victorian's sharpened sense of their own evanescence and the fin de siècle's fevered preoccupation with syphilis, the terror of "women people" in the naturalist novel, and the anxious connection between female authorship and prostitution in George Eliot. Throughout, they explore the ways in which the novel participates in society; Trollope and James are discussed alongside not only George Eliot and Hardy, Bram Stoker, and James Barrie but also nuneteenth-century economists and evolutionary biologists, with psychiatrists, sociologists, and even obstetricians.