From the Publisher
“In a stimulating text rich with “alternate facts”, Carver reminds us that history is also what failed to happen and that each historical present carries with it its fantasies of alternate realities. The counterfactual has become a banality today, but this stimulating history of plural virtualities demonstrates how poetic our prosaic 19th century was in fact, and how productively it confronted its own unrealized possibilities.” (Fredric Jameson, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, Duke University, USA)
“Ben Carver's lucid and insightful book reveals the spread of alternate-history speculation through a surprisingly wide range of nineteenth-century disciplines, genres, and national literatures. Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature makes an essential contribution to our understanding of the century's historical imagination.” (Catherine Gallagher, Eggers Professor of English Literature, Emerita, University of California, Berkeley, USA)
“Ben Carver has produced a rich, wide-ranging and imaginative study of a neglected genre that has much to teach us about the nineteenth century and its characteristic modes of narrating the past, present and future. This is, in short, a valuable alternate history of Victorian historiography, as well as an original contribution to our understanding of the utopian imagination.” (Matthew Beaumont, Professor of English Literature, University College London, UK)
