Critical discussions of the Victorian realist novel tend to focus on its vivid representations of everyday life. The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real proposes that the genre is founded in desire, moving the novels not towards a shared reality but rather toward distinct fantasies: dreams of the real. Rather than simply redefine Victorian realism or propose a new canon for it, The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real argues that the real is inevitably, for the Victorian realist novel, an object of desire: what the novel seeks to capture and represent. A novel's construction of the real is therefore inseparable from its fantasy of the real-a formulation Audrey Jaffe refers to as "realist fantasy." One way in which this simultaneity manifests itself is that the conventions novels frequently use to represent characters' dreams, daydreams, and fantasies overlap with those each novel uses to create its realist effects. In new readings of Victorian novels (including Eliot's Adam Bede, Dickens's Oliver Twist, Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Return of the Native, Trollope's Orley Farm, and Wilkie Collins's Armadale), The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real demonstrates that one of the signal effects of this overlapping is Victorian realism's construction of the real as an object of readerly desire. Jaffe shows that realism and fantasy in the Victorian realist novel are not opposed, but rather occupy the same space and are shaped by the same conventions. Revisiting and reconsidering key elements of realist novel theory (including metonymy; the insignificant detail; character interiority; the representation of everyday life and the idea of disillusionment), The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real also uncovers and anatomizes representational strategies unique to each text.

Telling in Henry James argues that James's contribution to narrative and narrative theories is a lifelong exploration of how to "tell," but not, as Douglas has it in "The Turn of the Screw" in any "literal, vulgar way." James's fiction offers multiple, and often contradictory, reading (in)directions. Zwinger's overarching contention is that the telling detail is that which cannot be accounted for with any single critical or theoretical lens-that reading James is in some real sense a reading of the disquietingly inassimilable "fictional machinery." The analyses offered by each of the six chapters are grounded in close reading and focused on oddments-textual equivalents to the "particles" James describes as caught in a silken spider web, in a famous analogy used in "The Art of Fiction" to describe the kind of "consciousness" James wants his fiction to present to the reader. Telling in Henry James attends to the sheer fun of James's wit and verbal dexterity, to the cognitive tune-up offered by the complexities and nuances of his precise and rhythmic syntax, and to the complex and contradictory contrapuntal impact of the language on the page, tongue, and ear.

Christian Isobel Johnstone's Clan-Albin: A National Tale was published in 1815, less than a year after Walter Scott's Waverley; or 'tis Sixty Years Since enthralled readers and initiated a craze for Scottish novels. Both as a novelist and as editor of Tait's Edinburgh Magazine from 1834 to 1846, Johnstone was a powerful figure in Romantic Edinburgh's literary scene. But her works and her reputation have long been overshadowed by Scott's. In Clan-Albin, Johnstone engages with themes on British imperial expansion, metropolitan England's economic and political relationships with the Celtic peripheries, and the role of women in public life. This rare novel, alongside extensive editorial commentary, will be of much interest to students of British Literature.

Christian Isobel Johnstone's Clan-Albin: A National Tale was published in 1815, less than a year after Walter Scott's Waverley; or 'tis Sixty Years Since enthralled readers and initiated a craze for Scottish novels. Both as a novelist and as editor of Tait's Edinburgh Magazine from 1834 to 1846, Johnstone was a powerful figure in Romantic Edinburgh's literary scene. But her works and her reputation have long been overshadowed by Scott's. In Clan-Albin, Johnstone engages with themes on British imperial expansion, metropolitan England's economic and political relationships with the Celtic peripheries, and the role of women in public life. This rare novel, alongside extensive editorial commentary, will be of much interest to students of British Literature.

Second only to Shakespeare in terms of performances, Ibsen is performed in almost every culture. Since Ibsen wrote his plays about bourgeois family life in Northern Europe, they have become part of local theatre traditions in cultures as different as the Chinese and the Zimbabwean, the Indian and the Iranian. The result is that today there are incredibly many and different 'Ibsens' around the world. A play like Peer Gynt can be staged on the same continent and in the same year as a politically progressive piece of theatre for development in one place, and as a nationalistic and orientalistic piece of elite spectacle in another. This book charts differences across cultures and political boundaries, and attempts to understand them through an in-depth analysis of their relation to political, social, ideological and economic forces within and outside of the performances themselves.Through the discussion of productions of Ibsen plays on three continents, this book explores how Ibsen is created through practice and his work and reputation maintained as a classics central to the theatrical repertoire.

Counter-revolutionary or wary progressive? Critical apologist for the Stuart and Hanoverian dynasties? What are the political and cultural significances of place when Scott represents the instabilities generated by the Union? Scott's Novels and the Counter-Revolutionary Politics of Place analyses Scott's sophisticated, counter-revolutionary interpretation of Britain's past and present in relation to those questions. Exploring the diversity within Scott's life and writings, as historian and political commentator, conservative committed to progress, Scotsman and Briton, lawyer and philosopher, this monograph focuses on how Scott portrays and analyses the evolution of the state through notions of place and landscape. It especially considers Scott's response to revolution and rebellion, and his geopolitical perspective on the transition from Stuart to Hanoverian sovereignty.

This book shows just how closely late nineteenth-century American women's ghost stories engaged with objects such as photographs, mourning paraphernalia, wallpaper and humble domestic furniture. Featuring uncanny tales from the big city to the small town and the empty prairie, it offers a new perspective on an old genre.

From the abolition era to the Civil Rights movement to the age of Obama, the promise of perfectibility and improvement resonates in the story of American democracy. But what exactly does racial "progress" mean, and how do we recognize and achieve it? Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress After Slavery uncovers a surprising answer to this question in the writings of American authors and activists, both black and white. Conventional narratives of democracy stretching from Thomas Jefferson's America to our own posit a purposeful break between past and present as the key to the viability of this political form-the only way to ensure its continual development. But for Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, Callie House, and the other figures examined in this book, the campaign to secure liberty and equality for all citizens proceeds most potently when it refuses the precepts of progressive time. Placing these authors' post-Civil War writings into dialogue with debates about racial optimism and pessimism, tracts on progress, and accounts of ex-slave pension activism, and extending their insights into our contemporary period, Laski recovers late-nineteenth-century literature as a vibrant site for doing political theory. Untimely Democracy ultimately shows how one of the bleakest periods in American racial history provided fertile terrain for a radical reconstruction of our most fundamental assumptions about this political system. Offering resources for moments when the march of progress seems to stutter and even stop, this book invites us to reconsider just what democracy can make possible.

Ecce Homo: A Survey in the Life and Work of Jesus Christ, published anonymously in 1865, alarmed some readers and delighted others by its presentation of a humanitarian view of Christ and early Christian history. Victorian Jesus explores the relationship between historian J. R. Seeley and his publisher Alexander Macmillan as they sought to keep Seeley's authorship a secret while also trying to exploit the public interest. Ian Hesketh highlights how Ecce Homo's reception encapsulates how Victorians came to terms with rapidly changing religious views in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hesketh critically examines Seeley's career and public image, and the publication and reception of his controversial work. Readers and commentators sought to discover the author's identity in order to uncover the hidden meaning of the book, and this engendered a lively debate about the ethics of anonymous publishing. In Victorian Jesus, Ian Hesketh argues for the centrality of this moment in the history of anonymity in book and periodical publishing throughout the century.

The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date. In scope, the book encompasses the genesis of the Arabic novel in the second half of the nineteenth century and its development to the present in every Arabic-speaking country and in Arab immigrant destinations on six continents. Editor Wail S. Hassan and his contributors describe a novelistic phenomenon which has pre-modern roots, stretching centuries back within the Arabic cultural tradition, and branching outward geographically and linguistically to every Arab country and to Arab writing in many languages around the world. The first of three innovative dimensions of this Handbook consists of examining the ways in which the Arabic novel emerged out of a syncretic merger between Arabic and European forms and techniques, rather than being a simple importation of the latter and rejection of the former, as early critics of the Arabic novel claimed. The second involves mapping the novel geographically as it took root in every Arab country, developing into often distinct though overlapping and interconnected local traditions. Finally, the Handbook concerns the multilingual character of the novel in the Arab world and by Arab immigrants and their descendants around the world, both in Arabic and in at least a dozen other languages. The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions reflects the current status of research in the broad field of Arab novelistic traditions and signals toward new directions of inquiry.

Bringing together the human story of care with its representation in film, fiction and memoir, this book combines an analysis of care narratives to inform and inspire ideas about this major role in life. Alongside analysis of narratives drawn from literature and film, the author sensitively interweaves the story of his wife's illness and care to illuminate perspectives on dealing with human decline. Examining texts from a diverse range of authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton and Alice Munro, and filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman and Michael Haneke, it addresses questions such as why caregiving is a dangerous activity, the ethical problems of writing about caregiving, the challenges of reading about caregiving, and why caregiving is so important. It serves as a fire starter on the subject of how we can gain insight into the challenges and opportunities of caregiving through the creative arts.

John Ruskin's training as an interdisciplinary polymath started in childhood. He learned to memorise the Bible at his mother's knee and published his first poem aged ten. His lifelong fascination with geology found its earliest expression in journal articles from the age of fifteen, while his considerable talents as a draughtsman were developed by leading drawing masters before he was sixteen. Rather than being a prodigy in one particular field, it was his precocious mix of religion, science and art that laid the foundations for the fulfilment of his career as a critic of art, architecture and society. The cultural tours that he made with his family as he grew up provided the crucial focus for these developing interests, and the second extended tour of the Continent in 1835 at the age of sixteen in particular established the paradigm for his orchestrated representation and analysis of cultural experience along 'the old road', through France to Chamonix, and through the Swiss Alps to northern Italy as far as Venice. His diary of the journey and associated writings, together with the numerous drawings he made in relation to it, are annotated and fully catalogued for the first time in this edition that includes maps and an introductory essay. Keith Hanley is Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University. Caroline S. Hull is a freelance academic writer and researcher.

Traditional accounts of Romantic and nineteenth-century poetry, have depicted John Clare as a peripheral figure, an 'original genius' whose talents set him apart from the mainstream of contemporary literary culture. But in recent years there has been a major shift of direction in Clare studies. Jonathan Bate, Zachary Leader and others have helped to show that Clare, far from being an isolated genius, was deeply involved in the rich cultural life both of his village and the metropolis. This study takes impetus from this new critical direction, offering an account of his poems as they relate to the literary culture of his day, and to literary history as it was being constructed in the early nineteenth century. Gorji defines a literary historical context in which Clare's poetry can best be understood, paying particular attention to questions of language and style. Rather than situating Clare in relation to Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, John Clare and the Place of Poetry considers his poetry in relation to eighteenth-century traditions as they persisted and developed in the Romantic period. This timely book is for scholars and students of Clare and eighteenth and nineteenth century poetry, but it should also appeal to the expanding audience for John Clare's work in the UK and USA.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Victorian literature is rife with scenes of madness, with mental disorder functioning as everything from a simple plot device to a commentary on the foundations of Victorian society. But while madness in Victorian fiction has been much studied, most scholarship has focused on the portrayal of madness in women; male mental disorder in the period has suffered comparative neglect. Valerie Pedlar corrects this imbalance in The 'Most Dreadful Visitation.' This extraordinary study explores a wide range of Victorian writings to consider the relationship between the portrayal of mental illness in literary works and the portrayal of similar disorders in the writings of doctors and psychologists. Pedlar presents in-depth studies of Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, Tennyson's Maud, Wilkie Collins's Basil, and Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, considering each work in the context of Victorian understandings-and fears-of mental degeneracy.

Prominent citizens in nineteenth-century England believed themselves to be living in a time of unstoppable progress. Yet running just beneath Victorian triumphalism were strong currents of chaos and uncertainty. Richard Walker plumbs the depths of those undercurrents in order to present an alternative history of nineteenth-century society. Mining literary and philosophical works of the period, Walker explores the crisis of identity that beset nineteenth-century thinkers and how that crisis revealed itself in portrayals of addiction, split personalities, and religious mania. Victorian England will never look the same.

In their celebration of 'little matters' - the regular round of visiting, dining out, drinking tea, of reading and walking to the shops and sending to the post - Jane Austen's letters and novels have many similarities. The thirteen letters collected by Jane Austen's House Museum, in Chawton, Hampshire and reproduced in this book give us intimate glimpses into her life in Bath and Chawton and on visits to London, many of their details finding echoes in her fiction. 'Jane Austen: The Chawton Letters' traces a lively story beginning in 1801, when, aged twenty-five, Jane Austen left Steventon in Hampshire to move to Bath. Later letters relish the shops, theatres and sights of London, but are interspersed from 1809 with the quieter routines of village life in Chawton, Hampshire, which was to be her home for the remainder of her short life. We learn here of her anxieties for the reception of Pride and Prejudice, her care in planning Mansfield Park and the hilarious negotiations over the publication of Emma. These letters, each accompanied by reproductions from the original manuscripts in Jane Austen's hand, testify to Jane's deep emotional bond with her sister: the most moving letter of all is that written by Cassandra only days after Jane's death in Winchester in July 1817. Brought together in this little book, these artefacts make a delightful modern-day keepsake of correspondence from one of the world's best-loved writers.

In this far-reaching literary history, John Wharton Lowe remakes the map of American culture by revealing the deep, persistent connections between the ideas and works produced by writers of the American South and the Caribbean. Lowe demonstrates that a tendency to separate literary canons by national and regional boundaries has led critics to ignore deep ties across highly permeable borders. Focusing on writers and literatures from the Deep South and Gulf states in relation to places including Mexico, Haiti, and Cuba, Lowe reconfigures the geography of southern literature as encompassing the ""circumCaribbean,"" a dynamic framework within which to reconsider literary history, genre, and aesthetics. Considering thematic concerns such as race, migration, forced exile, and colonial and postcolonial identity, Lowe contends that southern literature and culture have always transcended the physical and political boundaries of the American South. Lowe uses cross-cultural readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, including William Faulkner, Martin Delany, Zora Neale Hurston, George Lamming, Cristina Garcia, Edouard Glissant, and Madison Smartt Bell, among many others, to make his argument. These literary figures, Lowe argues, help us uncover new ways of thinking about the shared culture of the South and Caribbean while demonstrating that southern literature has roots even farther south than we realize.

Claudia Brodsky marshals her equal expertise in literature and philosophy to redefine the terms and trajectory of the theory and interpretation of modern poetry. Taking her cue from Wordsworth's revolutionary understanding of "real language," Brodsky unfolds a provocative new theory of poetry, a way of looking at poetry that challenges traditional assumptions. Analyzing both theory and practice, and taking in a broad swathe of writers and thinkers from Wordsworth to Rousseau to Hegel to Proust, Brodsky is at pains to draw out the transformative, active, and effective power of literature. Poetry, she says, is only worthy of the name when it is not the property of the poet but of society, when it is valued for what it does. Words' Worth is a bold new work, by a leading scholar of literature, which demands a response from all students and scholars of modern poetry.

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

In this book, Heather McAlpine argues that emblematic strategies play a more central role in Pre-Raphaelite poetics than has been acknowledged, and that reading Pre-Raphaelite works with an awareness of these strategies permits a new understanding of the movement's engagements with ontology, religion, representation, and politics. The emblem is a discursive practice that promises to stabilize language in the face of doubt, making it especially interesting as a site of conflicting responses to Victorian crises of representation. Through analyses of works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A.C. Swinburne, and William Morris, Emblematic Strategies examines the Pre-Raphaelite movement's common goal of conveying "truth" while highlighting differences in its adherents' approaches to that task.

This book proposes a comparative approach to the supernatural short stories of Machado de Assis, Henry James and Guy de Maupassant. It offers an alternative to predominantly novel-centric and Anglo-centric perspectives on literary pre-modernism by investigating a transnational and multilingual connection between genre, theme and theory, i.e., between the modern short story, the supernatural and the problem of knowledge. Incorporating a close analysis of the literary texts into a discussion of their historical context, the book argues that Machado, James and Maupassant explore and reinvent the supernatural short story as a metafictional genre. This modernized and innovative form allows them to challenge the dichotomies and conventions of realist and supernatural fiction, inviting their past and present readers to question common assumptions on reality and literary representation.

While the end of the nineteenth century is often associated with the rise of objectivity and its ideal of a restrained observer, scientific experiments continued to create emotional, even theatrical, relationships between scientist and his subject. On Flinching focuses on moments in which scientific observers flinched from sudden noises, winced at the sight of an animal's pain or cringed when he was caught looking, as ways to consider a distinctive motif of passionate and gestured looking in the laboratory and beyond. It was not their laboratory machines who these scientific observers most closely resembled, but the self-consciously emotional theatrical audiences of the period. Tiffany Watt-Smith offers close readings of four experiments performed by the naturalist Charles Darwin, the physiologist David Ferrier, the neurologist Henry Head, and the psychologist Arthur Hurst. Bringing together flinching scientific observers with actors and spectators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century theatre, it places the history of scientific looking in its wider cultural context, arguing that even at the dawn of objectivity the techniques and problems of the stage continued to haunt scientific life. In turn, it suggests that by exploring the ways recoiling, shrinking and wincing becoming paradigmatic spectatorial gestures in this period, we can understand the ways Victorians thought about looking as itself an emotional and gestured performance.