Prof. Rob Breton

Books

The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. (Reviewed here.)

The Oppositional Aesthetics of Chartist Fiction: Reading against the Middle-Class Novel. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016.

From Seven to Seventeen: Poems by John Ruskin. Edited with Alayna Becker and Katrina Schurter. Sydney: Juvenilia Press, 2012.

Gospels and Grit: Work and Labour in Carlyle, Conrad, and Orwell. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

Articles

“Class Acts: Juvenilia, John Ruskin, and the Humanities Today.” Journal of Juvenilia Studies. 7.1 (2025): 36-49.

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: The Beetle, Scandal, and the Trials of Oscar Wilde.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. 20.3 (Winter 2024). https://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue203/breton.html

“Past and Present in the Folk Fiction of Thomas Cooper.” Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature. 146 (2024): 237-250.

“Never Too Late: Queen’s Logic of Practice.” Rock Music Studies. (Published online: 13 Mar 2024). https://doi.org/10.1080/19401159.2024.2324243

“Leveling Up in Eliza Cook’s Journal of Popular Progress.” Victorian Periodicals Review. 56:3 (2023): 463-81.

“Violence and Masculinity in Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets.” Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature. 142 (2022): 103-115.

“On Heroes and Masculinity.” Carlyle Studies Annual. Accepted and forthcoming, 2023.

“Women and Children First: Appropriated Fiction in the Ten Hours’ Advocate.” Victorian Popular Fictions Journal. 3. 2 (Autumn 2021): https://victorianpopularfiction.org/victorian-popular-fictions-journal-volume-3-issue-2-autumn-2021/

“The Uses of Juvenilia: Ernest Jones’s Effusions.” Journal of Juvenilia Studies 2.1 (July 2019): https://journalofjuveniliastudies.com/index.php/jjs/issue/view/2

“From Politics to Pope: An Account of the Group Aesthetic.” Humanities 8.1 (2019): https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/8/1/32.

“Humanitarian Fiction.” Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory. Ed. Eugene O’Brien. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

“Portraits of the Poor in Early Nineteenth-Century Radical Journalism.” Journal of Victorian Culture 21.2 (June 2016): 168-183.

“William Morris’s Practical Joke.” The Journal of William Morris Studies 21.3 (2015): 22-37.

“Crime Reporting in Chartist Newspapers.” Media History 19.3 (2013): 1-13.

“John Ruskin’s Juvenilia and the Origins of the Pathetic Fallacy.” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies. 22 (Spring 2013): 17-36.

“Diverting the Drunkard’s Path: Chartist Temperance Narratives.” Victorian Literature and Culture. 41.1 (2013): 139-52.

“Utopia and Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Ancient Monk.’” English Language Notes.51.1 (Spring/Summer 2013): 211-222. Invited.

“Bourdieu, The Chimes, and the Bad Economist: Reading Disinterest.” College Literature. 39.1 (Winter 2012): 74-93.

“Violence and the Radical Imagination.” Victorian Periodicals Review. 44.1 (Spring 2011): 24-41.

“The Sentimental Socialism of Margaret Harkness.” English Language Notes. 48.1 (Spring /Summer 2010): 27-39.

“Typography in the Poor Man’s Guardian.” Victorian Institute Journal. 37 (2010): 225-244.

“Genre in the Chartist Periodical.” The Working-Class Intellectual in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. Ed. Aruna Krishnamurthy. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. 109-128.

“The Thrill of the Trill: Political and Aesthetic Discourse in George Eliot’s ‘Armgart.’” Victorian Review. 35.1 (2009): 116-131.

“Ghosts in the Machina: Plotting in Chartist and Working-Class Fiction.” Victorian Studies. 47.4 (2005): 557-575.

“The Stones of Happiness: Ruskin and Working-Class Culture.” Journal of Victorian Culture. 10.2 (2005): 210-228.

With Jonathan Wisenthal, Jeff Miller, et al, “Online Learning and Intellectual Liberty.” College Teaching. 45.1 (2005): 102-115.

“Occupations and Preoccupations: Work in Ulysses.” English Studies in Canada. 30.2 (2005): 105-128.

“WorkPerfect: William Morris and the Gospel of Work.” Utopian Studies. 13.1 (2002): 43-56.

“Crisis? Whose Crisis? George Orwell and Liberal Guilt.” College Literature. 29.4 (2002): 47-66.

With Lindsey McMaster, “Dissing the Age of Moo: Initiatives, Alternatives, and Rationality.” Slayage: An Online Journal of Buffy Studies. Ed. David Lavery and Rhonda Wilcox. www.slayage.tv. August 2000.