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Jane Austen's Business: Her World and Her Profession
by Juliet McMaster Bruce StovelJane Austen's Business is a collection of essays that demonstrates Austen knew her business. She presents with memorable distinctness not only 'what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly' but also 'what throbs fast and full' (Charlotte Bronte's phrases). Many of these essays, including those by Julia Prewitt Brown, Margaret Drabble, Jan Fergus, Isobel Grundy, Gary Kelly, and Elaine Showalter, are based on papers given at the Lake Louise conference on Persuasion. The collection's culmination is a short story by Margaret Drabble that brings Austen's Elliots of Kellynch Hall into the twentieth century.
The Literature of Nationalism: Essays on East European Identity (Studies in Russia and East Europe)
by Robert B. PynsentThe Literature of Nationalism concerns literature in its broadest sense and the manner in which, in belles lettres, the oral tradition and journalism, language and literature create national/nationalist myths. It treats East European culture from Finland to 'Yugoslavia', from Bohemia to Romania, from the nineteenth century to today. One third of the book concerns women and ethnic identity, and the rest covers subjects as varied as Bulgarian Fascism and the impact of political change on language in Hungary and ex-Yugoslavia.
Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries: A Study in the Theory and Conventions of Mid-Victorian Fiction
by David SkiltonFirst published in 1972, the second edition of this highly respected classic of Trollope criticism will be welcomed by Trollope scholars everywhere. David Skilton examines the literary background against which Trollope wrote, and drawing on the vast evidence of mid-Victorian periodical criticism, he shows how this criticism controlled the novelist's creativity. He then goes on to examine Trollope's particular type of realism in the context of the theories of literary imagination current in the 1860s. 'A book I admire. It has been of great value to me.' - J. Hillis Miller 'The first and still the best study of Trollope's relationships, connections and interactions with the literary world of his own time. Skilton's is the necessary introduction to any serious investigation of Trollope's fiction.' - John Sutherland
H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape: Biological Imperatives and Imaginative Obsessions
by Peter KempH.G. Wells's view of the world - and hence his writing - was strongly influenced by the biologist's training he received during his three years as a student at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington (now Imperial College, London). Those things which a creature needs in order for it and its species to thrive get particular attention in Wells's books. Tracing biological themes through Wells's work, as Peter Kemp does here, shows the pattern of his thought and brings to light the bizarre workings of a fascinating imagination. For the book's reissue in paperback, an afterword has been added.
Selected Letters of Leslie Stephen: Volume 1: 1864-1882
by John W. BicknellSince F.W. Maitland's Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1907), there has been no volume of the letters written by this extraordinary and eminent Victorian. Alpinist, literary critic, god-killer, editor of The Cornhill Magazine and The Dictionary of National Biography, biographer, historian of ideas, and father of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, Stephen corresponded with a host of men and women, including such notables as his American friends - James Russell Lowell, Justice Holmes and art historian Charles E. Norton; such contemporaries among the intelligentsia as John Morley, Henry Sidgwick, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, F.W. Maitland, and Thomas Hardy; and the members of his family - Minny, his first wife; his sister-in-law, Anny Ritchie; his son Thoby; and his best beloved second wife, Julia. In his letters, always readable, we find his enthusiasms, his ironic humour, his self-doubt and self-pity, his anguish over his retarded child Laura, his candour, his lively portraits of people and places, his delight in the young - Nessa, Ginia and Thoby, and his direct and easy style as he responds to his reader's interests and needs. This second volume follws the demanding years Stephen spent as Editor of The Dictionary of National Biography, his happy life with Julia until her death in 1895 and his continuing devotion to literature, a source of much solace in his last years.
Love between Men in English Literature
by Paul HammondThis is the first book to provide an account of the representation of emotional and sexual relationships between men across English literature from the Renaissance to the modern period. Based on new research but aimed at the student and the general reader, Paul Hammond discusses major writers such as Marlowe and Shakespeare, Tennyson and Wilde, Forster and Lawrence, but also introduces less familiar texts which cast light on the homosexual culture of their periods. There is an extensive bibliography.
The Victorian Social-Problem Novel: The Market, the Individual and Communal Life
by Josephine M. GuyThis book describes various accounts of the Victorian social-problem novel, examining their strengths and limitations in the light of the historiographical assumptions which underlie them. An alternative historical account is offered, which focuses on the novels' intellectual milieu - specifically on mid-Victorian concepts of 'the social' and of what was understood by the term 'social problem'. In detailed readings of individual works, the book argues that an appreciation of these concepts permits new ways of understanding the contradictions identified in these works together with their apparently 'conservative' politics.
Eve's Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists
by Valerie SandersThis study focuses on the work of four Victorian anti-feminist women writers - Eliza Lynn Linton, Charlotte M. Yonge, Mrs Humphry Ward, and Margaret Oliphant - examining their self-contradictory responses to the debate about women's role in family life and society. Individual chapters review women's anti-feminism from 1792-1850, and fresh readings of their best-known novels emphasize the inconsistencies of their masculine and feminine ideals.
The Imperial Experience: From Carlyle to Forster (Context and Commentary)
by C.C. EldridgeThis book examines attitudes towards empire and the creation and perpetuation of a British world-view during the years 1834-1924. Besides focusing on the usual Victorian and Edwardian novelists and poets, surveys of popular culture and anti-empire views are also included. By adopting a longer chronological context, the high level of continuity in beliefs and actions throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is highlighted. As a result, the period is viewed as a dramatic episode in a much longer story.
An Introduction to Shakespeare: The Dramatist in His Context
by Peter HylandPeter Hyland provides a highly readable account of the historical, social and political pressures of Shakespeare's England and the material conditions under which his plays were written, including a comprehensive description of the development and status of the theatrical profession. Half of the book is given over to a survey of the plays and examines numerous controversial issues that arise when we ask precisely what we can 'know' about them. For those who are daunted by the volume or the impenetrable prose of much recent writing on Shakespeare, Hyland's book will be a stimulating introduction.
Jean-Price Mars, the Haitian Elite and the American Occupation,1915-35
by Magdaline W. ShannonDr Jean Price-Mars, educated and trained in political and educational positions in Haiti and France, became one of its leading nationalists in the twentieth century. As one of the intellectual members of the predominantly mulatto Haitian elite he attempted to apprise them of their responsibility for the welfare of the black peasant population and the importance of returning democratic self-government to Haiti. Although successful in neither effort he continued a political and academic career which made him one of Haiti's most remembered politicians and scholars.
Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination
by Nicholas GreneThe world of Macbeth, with its absolutes of good and evil, seems very remote from the shifting perspectives of Antony and Cleopatra, or the psychological and political realities of Coriolanus. Yet all three plays share similar thematic concerns and preoccupations: the relations of power to legitimating authority, for instance, or of male and female roles in the imagination of (male) heoric endeavour. In this acclaimed study, Nicholas Grene shows how all nine plays written in Shakespeare's main tragic period display this combination of strikingly different milieu balanced by thematic interrelationships. Taking the English history play as his starting point, he argues that Shakespeare established two different modes of imagining: the one mythic and visionary, the other sceptical and analytic. In the tragic plays that followed, themes and situations are dramatised, alternately, in sacred and secular worlds. A chapter is devoted to each tragedy, but with a continuing awareness of companion plays: the analysis of Julius Caesar informing that of Hamlet, discussion of Troilus and Cressida counterpointed by the critique of Othello and the treatment of King Lear growing out from the limitations of Timon of Athens. The aim is to resist homogenising the plays but to recognise and explore the unique imaginative enterprise from which they arose.
Yeats’s Poetry and Poetics
by Michael J. SidnellYeats's Poetry and Poetics brings together some of the finest Yeats criticism ever published, together with some new pieces specially written for this volume. Spanning the whole of Yeats's career, the essays are organised into three main parts. The first deals with Yeats's concern with the speaking voice and its bearing on public and private readings of his verse; and on his use of certain kinds of images in his poetry and plays, from ghosts and fairies, to figures borrowed from painters and sculptors and, extraordinarily, to the actual dancer for whom he makes room in his work. The second section puts Yeats's poetry in context with the work of Synge, D.H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare and other 'Georgians', and with that of T.S. Eliot and other modernists; assessing the continuities (real and asserted) in Yeats's long poetic career against the revolutions in the poetry of his time. The profound connections between the writings of Yeats and Joyce, including the coupling of Finnegans's Wake and 'The Wanderings of Oisin' are also examined. Rounding off the volume 'Phantasmagoria', explores the implications for his poetics of Yeats's spiritualist philosophy, especially in terms of his conception of the poetic self, and, finally, the last section analyses two works animated by Yeats's quest for the 'faery bride' and his desperate attempt to attract, through his work, a real one.
Fantasy Fiction and Welsh Myth: Tales of Belonging
by Kath Filmer-DaviesThis book examines how contemporary fantasy literature offers critical insights into western society and culture by drawing on the ancient myths of Wales. These books emphasise the need to have a set of social and personal values in order to be free from a sense of dislocation and alienation in a highly technologised society and in order to satisfy the sense of 'hiraeth' or longing for a place where one truly belongs.
Literary Theories: A Case Study in Critical Performance
by William Baker Julian WolfreysEvery student of literature needs to understand how to use literary theory to analyse and interpret the text. Literary Theories challenges the out-dated notion that theory is something separable from the act of reading and interpretation and, believing that the best way to learn is through practical application, plunges the student into the midst of a range of critical readings. Clearly argued and lucidly written, these essays offer the student reader an interactive introduction to the ways in which contemporary literary theories challenge us to rethink interpretation, literary writing and critical reading.
Versions of the Past — Visions of the Future: The Canonical in the Criticism of T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom
by Lars Ole SauerbergWith the canon debate, prominent in literary criticism since the early 1970s, as the sounding board, the study aims at investigating and discussing in critical perspective the function of considerations to do with canon for literary criticism at the formation stage. It focuses on the interaction between a critic's canonical preferences ('versions of the past') and his desire for improved cultural and/or aesthetic conditions ('visions of the future') in the criticism of Eliot, Leavis, Frye and Bloom.
Applying: To Derrida
by J. Brannigan Ruth Robbins Julian WolfreysStriking out from a number of new headings and in a number of new directions each of the essays in this collection pushes at the borders of their topics, disciplines and ways of thinking, providing innovative and inventive insights into the work - and application - of Jacques Derrida on a diverse range of themes including Irish identity, communication, ethics, love, tele-technology, Victorian studies, the limits of philosophy, translation, otherness and literature, demonstrating that, today, despite repeated accusations over recent years that the work of Derrida has become passe, there is more vitality and spirit in engaging with the writings of Derrida than ever before.
Thomas Hardy: Selected Poetry and Non-Fictional Prose
Peter Widdowson's major new selection of Hardy's poetry offers the student a challenging assessment of his poetic achievement by juxtaposing Hardy's best known poems with some of his least known. In addition to the 184 poems and the selection of Hardy's prose writings (never before so fully annotated), Widdowson includes a lively introduction on Hardy's life and work, a critical essay re-assessing his place in literary history, and extensive explanatory notes on each poem and essay. The volume revitalises our understanding and enjoyment of a most enduringly popular poet and is set to prove a definitive student edition.
Contemporary British Theatre
by T. ShankContemporary British Theatre surveys the complex and dynamic theatre of the eighties and early nineties reflecting a country that is multicultural, multiethnic and multinational. The contributors - artists, scholars and critics - offer insights into the unique forms of theatre performance devised to express the tensions and pressures of our time. For the paperback edition a new preface has been written, including several updating pieces from individual contributors.
Carnival Culture and the Soviet Modernist Novel (St Antony's Series)
by Craig BrandistThis book examines the work of five Soviet prose writers - Olesha, Platonov, Kharms, Bulgakov and Vaginov - in the light of the carnivalesque elements of Russian popular culture. It shows that while Bakhtin's account of carnival culture sheds considerable light on the work of these writers, they need to be considered with reference to both the concrete forms of Russian and Soviet popular culture and the changing institutional framework of Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s.
No Discouragement: An Autobiography
by A.H. Halsey foreword Roy HattersleyThis is the autobiography of a working-class boy who became an Oxford professor. A.H. Halsey was born in Kentish Town, London, in 1923 - a railway child in a large clan. The family moved in 1926 to Rutland and then to Northamptonshire because the father had been wounded in the Great War. Halsey 'won the scholarship' to Kettering Grammar School in 1933, left school at 16, went into the RAF as a pilot cadet. The metaphor of travel through time and space is maintained throughout this autobiography. The story begins with daily walks past canal boats in Oxford, flashes to the Pacific to Hong Kong and China, and then to a glimpse of death in the John Radcliffe Hospital, promising to explain the whole journey from a council housing estate to a professorial chair at Oxford.
The Novel of Female Adultery: Love and Gender in Continental European Fiction, 1830–1900
by Bill OvertonThe novel of adultery is a nineteenth-century form about the experience of women, produced almost exclusively by men. Bill Overton's study is the first to address the gender implications of this form, and the first to write its history. The opening chapter defines the terms 'adultery' and 'novel of adultery', and discusses how the form arose in Continental Europe, but failed to appear in Britain. Successive chapters deal with its development in France, and with examples from Russia, Denmark, Germany, Spain and Portugal.
The Brontes: Interviews and Recollections (Interviews and Recollections)
by Harold OrelThe Brontes, living in an isolated village in Yorkshire, wrote some of the most vivid, imaginative, and widely-read novels of the Victorian Age; they also became the subject-matter of romanticized anecdotes and regrettably distorted biographies. The best testimony about what kinds of men and women they really were comes from statements they made themselves; but because their autobiographical commentaries are sparse, the record is usefully supplemented in this anthology by first-hand statements made not only by various inhabitants of Haworth, but by those who met members of the Bronte family in Yorkshire, London, and elsewhere.
Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination
by J. Michael DashImaginative literature, argues Michael Dash, does not merely reflect, but actively influences historical events. He demonstrates this by a close examination of the relations between Haiti and the United States through the imaginative literature of both countries. The West's mythification of Haiti is a strategy used to justify either ostracism or domination, a process traced here from the nineteenth-century until it emerges with a voyeuristic fierceness in the 1960s. In an effort to resist these stereotypes, Haitian literature becomes a subversive manoeuvre permitting Haitians to 'rewrite' themselves. The Unites States 'invented' Haiti as a land of savagery and mystery, a source of evil and shame. Weaving together text and historical context, Dash discusses the durability of these images, which continue to shape official policy and popular attitudes today.
Six Contemporary Dramatists: Bennett, Potter, Gray, Brenton, Hare, Ayckbourn
by Duncan Wu`A most illuminating study.' - John Bayley Six Contemporary Dramatists explores, in a straightforward manner, the central concerns of six of the most important contemporary dramatists. It demonstrates how the work of Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter, Simon Gray, Howard Brenton, David Hare and Alan Ayckbourn is essentially moral, and relates their aspirations to the British romantic tradition of the last century. At the same time, Duncan Wu explores how each writer has responded to the changes that took place in personal and public ethics during the 1980s as a result of Thatcherism. He also includes an interview with Alan Ayckbourn, published here for the first time, in which the volume's themes are focused and summarised. For the paperback edition, a substantial preface discussing Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, David Hare's Skylight and David Edgar's Pentecost has been added. This is an essential and readable guide to televised and theatrical drama for students and theatregoers alike.