ABSTRACT

In 2019, it is no longer possible to say, as Christopher Herbert did in 1998, that Victorian anthropology has been excluded from the field of reputable inquiry in Victorian studies. Over the past 20 years, literary scholars have begun reexamining both the anthropologists and the relationships between anthropological and literary writing. This chapter provides a brief history of scholarship on anthropology and literature in the Victorian period before 1998 and then details the scholarly conversations about marriage, myth, secularism, and science that inform criticism on anthropology and literature written over the past two decades.