Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction

Focusing on works by George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, Alice Crossley expounds on the emergence of adolescence in the mid-Victorian period as a distinct category of identity and form of experience. She argues that male adolescence provides Thackeray, Trollope, and Meredith with opportunities for self-reflection and social criticism while also working as a paradigm for narrative and imaginative inquiry about motivation, egotism, emotional and physical relationships, and the possibilities of self-creation.