Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses assembles essays spanning the last thirty years, including a selection of Peter Larkin's original verse, with the concept of promise and loss serving as the uniting narrative thread.

Taking as a starting point the parallel occurrence of Cook's Pacific voyages, the development of natural history, scenic tourism in Britain, and romantic travel in Europe, this book argues that the effect of these practices was the production of nature as an abstract space and that the genre of travel writing had a central role in reproducing it.

India was the object of intense sympathetic concern during the Romantic period. But what was the true nature of imaginative engagement with British India? This study explores how a range of authors, from Edmund Burke and Sir William Jones to Robert Southey and Thomas Moore, sought to come to terms with India's strangeness and distance from Britain.

Despite attracting the admiration of Modernists like Nabokov and Borges, Stevenson remains for many an apologist for the lost world of the romance. This is not only to misread and simplify his fiction, it is greatly to undervalue his lively, forward-looking literary essays. Strenously resisting the authority of the literary 'fathers' (though haunted by the complexities of paternity), Stevenson reveals strong affinities with emergent Modernism. It is from this perspective that Alan Sandison's latest book (the first to appear for nearly thirty years) conducts a lively and readable re-examination of this often underrated writer.

Edward Carpenter: In Appreciation, first published in 1931, presents a collection of tributes to and reminiscences about the renowned socialist poet, pioneering gay rights activist, environmentalist and political thinker. Embroiled in controversy with prominent figures of all political persuasions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Carpenter's vision of sexual freedom, democracy and an end to commercialism was maintained with integrity over the course of his whole life. These portraits and anecdotes testify to a man of both determination and warmth, whose writings, though inspirational for many up to the 1960s, are seldom read today.

Jan Gordon proposes that a reviled communicational 'interest' in gossip and its purveyors be given its proper due in the development of the novel in Britain. Commencing with Sir Walter Scott's historically persecuted (but economically and politically necessary) androgynous voices in caves and concluding with Oscar Wilde's premature celebration of gossip at the very moment it is transformed from public opinion to public judgment, the author finds gossip to be both deforming and shaping nineteenth century 'letters' in surprising ways. Like the ignominious orphan-figure of nineteenth-century fiction, gossip is the 'unacknowledged reproduction' searching for a political antecedence which might lend a legitimacy to its often discontinuous testimony, for a culture historically resistant to obtrusive voices.

This monograph covers Dickens and creativity, analysing both his discussion of creativity and imagination and illustrations in his work.Charles Dickens' experience and imagining of creativity is at the heart of his self-awareness, subject-matter and narrative. His intelligence works intuitively rather than conceptually and ideas about imagination often emerge informally in personal letters and implicitly through characters, language and story. His self-analysis and reflexive tendency are embedded in his styles and forms of narrative and dialogue, images of normality, madness, extremity, subversion and disorder, poetry and inter-textuality, anticipating and shaping the languages of modernism, influencing James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as well as traditionalists like H.G. Wells and Evelyn Waugh.Discussing Dickens' novels and some of his letters, sketches, essays and stories, Barbara Hardy offers a fascinating demonstration of creativity.

This book argues that Walter Pater and Algernon Swinburne draw upon the legacy of Romantic Hellenism in order to explore the possibilities of a secular model of enchantment and to complicate the common Victorian assumption that secularisation was a story about rationality, disillusionment, and loss.

The novel is the literary form that most extensively informs us of nineteenth-century English culture: not its realities but the ideologies that shaped social beliefs. Fiction not only reflects ideologies; it participates in their formation and modification. But ideologies shift rapidly - more than actualities of personal or social life, making the form of the novel shift accordingly. Consideration of four pairs of English novels, each of which extensively treats the most critical issue of the period - the survival of the family - shows how changes in ideology prompted fundamental revisions of fictional techniques and structures.

This comprehensive account demonstrates how Hartman's commitment to the potency of aesthetic mediation informs a similar position in current debates about ethics, media, and memory. "Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust" offers the first comprehensive critical account of the work of the American literary critic Geoffrey Hartman. The book aims to achieve two things: first, it charts the whole trajectory of Hartman's career (now more than half a century long) while playing close attention to the place of his career in broader cultural and intellectual contexts; second, it engages with contemporary discussions about ecology, ethics, trauma, the media, and community in order to argue that Hartman's work presents a surprisingly consistent and original position in current debates in literary and cultural studies. Vermeulen identifies a persistent belief in the potency of aesthetic mediation at the heart of Hartman's project, and shows how his work repeatedly reasserts that belief in the face of institutional, cultural and intellectual factors that seem to deny the singular importance of literature. The book allows Hartman to emerge as a major literary thinker whose relevance extends far beyond the domains of Romanticism, of literary theory, and of trauma studies.

This new, corpus-driven approach to the study of language and style of literary texts makes use of the Dickens' 4.6 million-word corpus for a detailed examination of patterns of lexical collocations. It offers new insights into Dickens' linguistic innovation, together with a nuanced understanding of his use of language to achieve stylistic ends. At the center of the study is a close analysis of the two narratives in "Bleak House," read as a focal point for consideration of Dickens' stylistic development through his whole writing life.

This book tackles the interpretative problem of "pleasure" in Keats's poetry by placing him in the context of the liberal, leisured, and luxurious culture of Hunt's circle. Challenging the standard interpretation that attributes Keats's poetic development to his separation from Hunt, Mizukoshi argues that Keats, imbued with Hunt's bourgeois ethic and aesthetic, remained a poet of sensuous pleasure through to the end of his short career.

Meeting Coleridge was one of the Romantic age's most memorable experiences, and many of his contemporaries left vivid records--Wordsworth, Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats, Emerson, and many now forgotten. This book is a comprehensive, fully annotated collection of such reminiscences. Drawing on an eclectic range of material (including journals, letters, poems, and comic portraits), and printing many texts otherwise difficult to access, it will prove an invaluable resource for students of romanticism, as well as a treasure-trove for Coleridge's many fans.

These essays explore the remarkable expansion of publishing from 1750 to 1850 which reflected the growth of literacy, and the diversification of the reading public. Experimentation with new genres, methods of advertising, marketing and dissemination, forms of critical reception and modes of access to writing are also examined in detail. This collection represents a new wave of critical writing extending cultural materialism beyond its accustomed concern with historicizing the words on the page into the economics of literature, and the investigation of neglected areas of print culture.

In this new study of George Eliot's fiction, textual attempts to imagine a coherent and unified national past are seen as producing a contradictory vision of Englishness. It is a historiographical national identity, constructed in the image of predominant, and conflicting, trends in the Victorian writing of history. The inherent uncertainty caused by the shift between different perceptions of English history leads, in the later fiction, to an abandonment of contemporaneous grand narratives. The consequence is a history that anticipates a more modern, radical philosophy of history.

Although Gothic writing is now seen as significant for an understanding of modernity, it is still largely characterized as a literature of fear and anxiety. "Gothic and the Comic Turn" argues that, partly through its desire to be taken seriously, Gothic criticism has neglected the comic doppelganger that has always inhabited the Gothic mode and which in certain texts emerges as dominant. Tracing an historical trajectory from the late Romantic period through to the present day, this book examines how varieties of comic parody and appropriation have interrogated the complexities of modern subjectivity.

Providing a ready access to the main facts of Poe's life and career, this Chronology will be of service to the student, scholar or general reader who wishes to check a point quickly without referring to the detailed narratives offered by the standard biographies. The Chronology includes details of Poe's works, both those published in his lifetime and those which appeared posthumously. There is a full index of persons, places and works referred to.

J.L. Bradley's chronology captures much of the drama and excitement of Shelley's life. This is an informative, often witty account which will be extremely valuable to all Shelley students, scholars and enthusiasts. A section on the Shelley circle is a particularly helpful supplement to the main body of the book.

The practice of poetry in the Victorian period was characterised by an extreme diversity of styles, preoccupations and subject-matter. This anthology attempts to draw out some of the main focuses of interest in the Victorian poet. No Victorian poet produced an overall theory of poetry, yet all accepted it as a natural vehicle of expression, and for some subjects, in particular sexuality, the only literary mode. Indeed, the sexual question was made even more acute by the sudden phenomenon of the 'poetess', and the relation of poetry to gender raised interesting new critical questions. At the same time, the cultural role of the poet came under increasing debate: Victorian poetry was the first contemporary poetry to be studied. This selection of central texts illustrates these pressures on the Victorian practice of poetry, and the introductory remarks suggest ways in which theory can be related to the understanding key poems themselves.

In recent decades the vision of Austen as a subversive or rebellious author has appeared most forcefully in the varied scholarship of feminist literary critics. Some feminists have fashioned an Austen more closely linked to what Juliet Mitchell has called 'The Longest Revolution' (the women's movement) than to the French Revolution; others have vehemently disagreed. Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism involves - among other things - a reassessment of these versions of Austen's relationship to feminisms. By foregrounding issues ofartistic merit, genre, and history, many literary critics have effectively ignored issues of gender in their studies of Austen; feminist scholarship provided an important corrective. On the other hand, some feminist criticism, although it approached Austen's texts in innovative ways, gave short shrift to issues ofhistory, literary genre, social context, or artistry. This volume aims implicitly and explicitly to recap second-wave feminist attention to Austen and to suggest new directions that criticism on Austen might take.

Virginia Woolf's Influential Forebears reveals under-acknowledged nineteenth-century legacies which shaped Woolf as a writing woman. Marion Dell identifies significant lines of descent from the lives and works of Woolf's great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the writer she called aunt, Anny Thackeray Ritchie, and her mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen.

The 1990s have witnessed a major reassessment of Blake initiated by a new and more rigorous comprehension of his modes of production, which in turn has led to re-evaluation of other literary and cultural contexts for his work. Blake in the Nineties grapples with the implications of the new bibliography for Blake studies, in its editorial, interpretative, and historical dimensions. As well as providing an international overview of recent Blake criticism, the collection contributes to current debates in a variety of disciplines dealing with the Romantic period, including art history, counter-Enlightenment-scholarship, theology and hermeneutic theory.

This book focuses on an exciting moment in the history of Anglo-German literary exchange in the Romantic period, the moment of George Gordon Byron's and Percy Bysshe Shelley's interrelated encounters with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's seminal dramatic poem, Faust.

Oscar Wilde was a consumer modernist. His modernist aesthetics drove him into the heart of the mass culture industries of 1890s London, particularly the journalism and popular theatre industries.

Wilde was extremely active in these industries: as a journalist at the Pall Mall Gazette; as magazine editor of the Womena (TM)s World; as commentator on dress and design through both of these; and finally as a fabulously popular playwright.

Because of his desire to impact a mass audience, the primary elements of Wildea (TM)s consumer aesthetic were superficial ornament and ephemeral public image a " both of which he linked to the theatrical. This concern with the surface and with the ephemeral was, ironically, a foundational element of what became twentieth-century modernism a " thus we can call Wildea (TM)s aesthetic a consumer modernism, a root and branch of modernism that was largely erased.