Table of Contents

Contents: Introduction: All the queen's horses: Victorian culture and 'the definition of a horse; Handling the 'iron horse': Dickens, travel, and the derailing of Victorian masculinity; Horsebreaking and homemaking: horsey heroines and destabilized domesticity in the sensation fiction of Mary E. Braddon; Horses and corsets: Black Beauty, dress reform, and the fashioning of the Victorian woman; Reading and riding: late-century aesthetics and the cultural economy of the turf in George Moore's Esther Waters; Epilogue: Urban ironies and the modern mind: horses after Victoria; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author

Gina M. Dorré is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno, where whe teaches writing and literature.

Reviews

’... impressive work... Dorré combines a wealth of cultural-historical material with innovative readings of nineteenth-century texts... make[s] significant contributions to our understanding of the place of the animal in Victorian literature and culture.’ Journal of Victorian Culture ’... this is a thought-provoking and worthwhile book, alerting us especially to the vitality and complexity of Victorian fiction, and its exuberant use of metaphor as a descriptive, structural and socially-critical device. What Dorré analyzes as the 'displacement' of gender and class anxieties onto the body of the horse, produces a rich and complex symbolic language that she has in part decoded for us.’ Anthrozoös