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Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing
by S. ManningFragments of Union , a new approach to comparative literary studies, is about forms of connections: between nations, literatures, individuals, words. It asks how, and why, connections get severed, and about the nature of the pieces that remain. Interdisciplinary readings of writings by Scots and Americans re-draw the literary map of both countries during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. Political, philosophical, cultural and grammatical dimensions give its analysis sharp relevance to the new conditions presented by devolved government in Britain.
The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature
by Richard Marggraf TurleyThis innovative study examines a range of canonical and non-canonical materials to open a new narrative on the mutually illuminating interchange between Romantic literature and philological theory in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Arguing that philology can no longer be treated as something that did not happen to Romantic authors, this book undertakes a substantial revision of our understanding of the intellectual and political contexts that helped determine the Romantic consciousness
Political and Social Issues in British Women’s Fiction, 1928–1968
by E. MaslenIn Political and Social Issues in British Women's Fiction, 1928-1968 , Elizabeth Maslen reassesses fiction written by women between the granting of universal franchise and the advent of new-wave feminism. Through close readings of a wide range of novels, Maslen analyses how writers chose to represent such issues as pacifism and the threat of fascism, war, race and class, and gender, exploring in the process how the writers' priorities affect their decisions on how to write.
Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
by J. McMasterMcMaster's lively study looks at the various codes by which Eighteenth-century novelists made the minds of their characters legible through their bodies. She tellingly explores the discourses of medicine, physiognomy, gesture and facial expression, completely familiar to contemporary readers but not to us, in ways that enrich our reading of such classics as Clarissa and Tristram Shandy , as well as of novels by Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen.
Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and the Mentor-Lover
by P. MenonThis lucid and tightly-argued study uses the motif of the mentor-lover - embodying diverse permutations of sexual love, power and judgement - to explore, evaluate and compare the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot as they contend with issues of sexuality, family, selfhood, freedom, conduct and gender. The figure also provides a means to probe their relationship to the reader as they become mentor-lovers through authorship, each eliciting a different form of love and electing a different style of instruction.
National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain (Studies in Modern History)
by M. MorganThis book explores components of national identity in Victorian Britain by analyzing travel literature. It draws on published and unpublished travel journals by middle-class men and women from England, Scotland, and Wales who toured the Continent and/or Britain. The main aim is to illustrate both the contexts that inspired the various collective identities of Britishness, Englishness, Scotsness, and Welshness, as well as the qualities Victorian men and women had in mind when they used such terms to identify and imagine themselves collectively.
British Romanticism and Continental Influences: Writing in an Age of Europhobia
by P. MortensenDuring the 1790s and 1800s, cultural critics became convinced that Britain was being 'inundated' by pernicious literary translations imported from the European Continent. British Romanticism and Continental Influences discusses Romantic writers' complex and ambivalent responses to this threatening literary invasion. Confronted with foreign texts that seemed both attractive and repulsive, Mortensen argues, Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge publicly distanced themselves from European sensationalism, even as they assimilated and revised its conventions in their own writing.
Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War 1618-48
by G. MortimerThe Thirty Years War - the first great pan-European war, and until the twentieth century the most terrible - ravaged Germany, but myth, propaganda and historical controversy have obscured its true nature. Another perspective is provided by the private diaries, memoirs and chronicles of soldiers and citizens who recorded their own experiences. War at the individual level is discussed and described using these sources, which are extensively quoted in their own words.
Language, Logic and Epistemology: A Modal-Realist Approach
by C. NorrisNorris presents a series of closely linked chapters on recent developments in epistemology, philosophy of language, cognitive science, literary theory, musicology and other related fields. While to this extent adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Norris also very forcefully challenges the view that the academic 'disciplines' as we know them are so many artificial constructs of recent date and with no further role than to prop up existing divisions of intellectual labour. He makes his case through some exceptionally acute revisionist readings of diverse thinkers such as Derrida, Paul de Man, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Michael Dummett and John McDowell. In each instance Norris stresses the value of bringing various trans-disciplinary perspectives to bear while none-the-less maintaining adequate standards of area-specific relevance and method. Most importantly he asserts the central role of recent developments in cognitive science as pointing a way beyond certain otherwise intractable problems in philosophy of mind and language.
Representations of Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse
by A. PadamseeThis study questions current views that Muslims represented a secure point of reference for the British understanding of colonial Indian society. Through revisionary readings of a wide range of texts, it re-examines the basis of the British misperception of Muslim 'conspiracy' during the 'Mutiny'. Arguing that this belief stemmed from conflicts inherent to the secular ideology of the colonial state, it shows how in the ensuing years it produced representations ridden with paradox and requiring a form of descriptive segregation.
The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)
by D. PayneAn ambitious weave of ideological, literary, and commodity history, The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction shows how Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot sacralized Victorian modernity in two contradictory ways: by incarnating their moment as one of transcendent development, and by reenacting bloody rituals from a fading Protestant past. Both the magnitude and the brevity of their success make these works exemplary for our own era, caught between the archaic gods of traditional religion and the still-mysterious ones of market society.
Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England
by J. PeakmanMighty Lewd Books describes the emergence of a new home-grown English pornography. Through the examination of over 500 pieces of British erotica, this book looks at sex as seen in erotic culture, religion and medicine throughout the long eighteenth-century, and provides a radical new approach to the study of sexuality.
The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet
by J. PhelanWhat was the appeal of 'the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground' to Romantic and Victorian poets? How did a form which had fallen into disuse in the early eighteenth-century become a central and enduring part of nineteenth-century poetry? This study traces the history and development of the sonnet throughout the nineteenth-century, examining the work of Wordsworth, Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith and a number of other key canonical and non-canonical writers.
Hardy's Geography: Wessex and the Regional Novel
by R. PiteHardy's Geography reconsiders a familiar element in Hardy's novels: their use of place and, specifically, of Dorset. Hardy said his Wessex was a 'partly real, partly dream-country'. This study examines how reality and dream interact in his work. Should we look for a real place corresponding to Casterbridge? What is the relation between one person's feelings for a place and society's view of it. Pite concludes that Hardy addresses these issues through a distinctive regional awareness.
Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890 - 1939
by L. PlattThis book offers the first full historical treatment of a music theatre that was once at the centre of London's West End. From the late Victorian period to the early 1920s, musical comedy was the single most popular form of 'legitimate' theatre entertainment. This lively account establishes musical comedy as one of the first industrial cultures and offers fascinating insights into how it functioned ideologically as a celebrated embracing of the modern condition.
The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800-1835: Exhuming the Trade
by F. PotterTo better understand and contextualise the twilight of the Gothic genre during the 1920s and 1830s, The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800-1835: Exhuming the Trade examines the disreputable aspects of the Gothic trade from its horrid bluebooks to the desperate hack writers who created the short tales of terror. From the Gothic publishers to the circulating libraries, this study explores the conflict between the canon and the twilight, and between the disreputable and the moral.
Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture
by F. RodenSame-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture examines the role of Christian history in nineteenth-century definitions of homosexual identity. Roden charts the emergence of the modern homosexual in relation to religious, not exclusively sociological discourses. Positing Catholicism as complementary to classical Greece, he challenges the separatism of sexuality and religion in critical practice. Moving from Newman and Rossetti, to Hopkins, Wilde, and Michael Field amongst others, Same-Sex Desire claims a new literary history, bringing together gay studies and theology in Victorian literature.
Literary Culture in Jacobean England: Reading 1621
by P. SalzmanThis book offers an unparalleled depth of historical research by surveying the extraordinary richness of literary culture in a single year. Paul Salzman examines what is written, published, performed and, in some cases, even spoken during 1621 in Britain. Well-known works by writers such as Donne, Burton, Middleton, and Ralegh, are examined alongside hitherto unknown works in a huge variety of genres: plays, poems, romances, advice books, sermons, histories, parliamentary speeches, royal proclamations. This is a work of literary history that greatly enhances knowledge of what it was like to read, write and listen in early modern Britain.
The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: From Austen to Woolf
by V. SandersThis book argues that brother-sister relationships, idealized by the Romantics, intensified in nineteenth-century English domestic culture, and is a neglected key to understanding Victorian gender relations. Attracted by the apparent purity of the sibling bond, novelists and poets also acknowledged its innate ambivalence and instability, through conflicting patterns of sublimated devotion, revenge fantasy, and corrosive obsession. The final chapter shows how the brother-sister bond was permanently changed by the experience of the First World War.
Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley and Byron
by P. SchockCriticism has largely emphasised the private meaning of 'Romantic Satanism', treating it as the celebration of subjectivity through allusions to Paradise Lost that voice Satan's solitary defiance. The first full-length treatment of its subject, Romantic Satanism explores this literary phenomenon as a socially produced myth exhibiting the response of writers to their milieu. Through contextualized readings of the major works of Blake, Shelley, and Byron, this book demonstrates that Satanism enabled Romantic writers to interpret their tempestuous age: it provided them a mythic medium for articulating the hopes and fears their age aroused, for prophesying and inducing change.
Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination
by Philip ShawWaterloo and the Romantic Imagination offers a new and challenging look at the cultural significance of the Battle of Waterloo, and the impact it had on British Romantic culture. Drawing on a range of approaches it aims to redefine the Romantic period as an age of inter- and intra-national conflict, thus overturning conventional notions of 'The Romantic Project', and re-writing the period from first principles. Topics covered include: the impact of Waterloo on Romantic ideas of individual and national identity, the representation of the dead and wounded in poetry, painting and prose, the work of canonical and non-canonical poets.
Animals, Literature and the Politics of Representation
by J. SimonsThis book addresses the question of animal rights in the context of literary criticism. Working from a committed position, it asks the question, 'What would literary studies look like if we took animal rights seriously?' It offers critical surveys of the main themes in the history of animal rights and some of the more important contemporary positions together with readings of a wide range of literary texts from classical antiquity to the present day.
Beckett's Eighteenth Century
by F. SmithBeckett's Eighteenth Century is the first book-length study of Samuel Beckett's affinity with the British eighteenth century and of the influence of its writers on his work. Reading Swift, Pope, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Johnson, Gray, and other writers of this period, this study demonstrates how he was not only influenced by them but interprets them for us in a quite modern way. Beckett's uniqueness is not questioned here, but this uniqueness is shown, paradoxically, to have its roots at least in part in his native literature of two centuries ago.
Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560-1621: The Politics of Absence (Early Modern Literature in History)
by R. SmithThis study explores why women in the English Renaissance wrote so few sonnet sequences, in comparison with the traditions of Continental women writers and of English male authors. In this focus on a single genre, Rosalind Smith examines the relationship between gender and genre in the early modern period, and the critical assumptions currently underpinning questions of feminine agency within genre.
Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture
by S. DonovanThis highly original study opens up a new dimension to Joseph Conrad by revealing his lifelong fascination with the popular culture of his day. Drawing on original archival materials and treating subjects as diverse as Bovril advertising, spirit photography, sea shanties, global tourism, and the new sport of speed-walking, it shows how Conrad's fiction makes a sustained response to early-twentieth-century popular culture and will be of interest to all students, scholars and enthusiasts of Conrad.