Size: 8vo-over 7.75"-9.75" tall; Gift quality hardcover in red paper covered

Size: 8vo-over 7.75"-9.75" tall; Gift quality hardcover in red paper covered boards showing sharp tips and spine ends. 245pp text is fine, crisp and appears unread. Unclipped, unpriced dust wrapper shows light handling soil at periphery/fore edge is the only fault seen. A work of research. Drawing on Trollope's unpublished notes on seventeenth-century drama and bringing light to many instances in the novels of direct borrowings from old plays, Herbert reveals Trollope carrying out a steady critique of the Victorian subversion of pleasure and in doing so by means of a subtle and almost recklessly inventive deployment of comic materials. Herbert emphasizes the tension between Trollop's allegiance to comic pleasure and his strain of moral earnestness, a tension that is symptomatic of strains in Victorian culture at large but here pays rich dividends, yielding much of the novelists richest and most suggestive and problematic writing.