Ruskin, the great Victorian critics of art and society, had an enormous influence on his age and our own. A highly successful propagandist for the arts, he did much both to popularize high art and to bring it to the masses. A brilliant theorist and practical critics of realism, he also produced the finest nineteenth-century discussions of fantasy, the grotesque, and pictorial symbolism. Most who have written about this outstanding Victorian polymath have approached him either as literary critics or as art historians. In this book, which was first published in 1985, George P. Landow provides a more balanced view and offers a strikingly new approach which reveals that Ruskin wrote throughout his career as an interpreter, an exegete. His interpretations covered many fields of human experience and endeavour, not only paintings, poems, and buildings but also contemporary social issues, such as the discontent of the working classes.

From the late nineteenth century women began to enter British universities. Their numbers were small and their gains hard won and fiercely contested, yet they inspired a whole new genre of fiction. This collection of largely forgotten and rare texts forms a valuable primary resource for scholars of literature, social history and women's education.

Orientalist research has most often been characterised as an integral element of the European will-to-power over the Asian world. This study seeks to nuance this view, and asserts that British Orientalism in India was also an inherently complex and unstable enterprise, predicated upon the cultural authority of the Sanskrit pandits.

'Internationalism in Children's Series' investigates 'internationalism' through various cultural, historical and theoretical lenses in series created for a child readership. Using the familiarity of the series character and format to form a bridge to the wider world, authors from the 19th century to contemporary times have expanded the definition of internationalism. This volume examines these definitions as they vary from series to series and even book to book in a rapidly changing, ever-shrinking world.

Even if Bentham and Coleridge] had had no great influence they would still have been the classical examples they are of two great opposing types of mind. . . . And as we follow Mill's analysis, exposition and evaluation of this pair of opposites we are at the same time, we realize, forming a close acquaintance with a mind different from either. From the introduction

Who owns, who buys, who gives, and who notices objects is always significant in Austen's writing, placing characters socially and characterizing them symbolically. Jane Austen's Possessions and Dispossessions looks at the significance of objects in Austen's major novels, fragments, and juvenilia.

This work takes a new approach to the evolution of the modern English lyric, emphasizing the way in which several generations of poets, reacting to post-Reformation readers' dislike for invented poetic narratives, competed for the right to commemorate important public occasions and slowly expanded the range of acceptable occasions. The book demonstrates that many fundamental features of a typical modern lyric actually evolved as responses to the limitations of occasional poetry.

Gothic Science Fiction explores the fascinating world of gothic influenced science fiction. From Frankenstein to Doctor Who and from H. G Wells to Stephen King, the book charts the rise of a genre and follows the descent into darkness that consumes it.

The Open Book is a provocative study of literary influence at work in English writing from Hardy to Woolf. Jensen reimagines the links between text and context as she endeavors to historicize literary influence, by taking Bloomian "anxiety" and Kristevan "intertextuality" into fields of actual history and biography. Jensen both borrows from and deconstructs the ideas of thesetheorists as she reads the texts of Hardy, Stephen, Woolf, Mansfield, andMiddleton Murry. By doing so, The Open Book offers a fresh and pragmatic opening onto the relation between personal, cultural and institutional history on the one hand, and literary history on the other.

In his study of Romantic naturalists and early environmentalists, Dewey W. Hall asserts that William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson were transatlantic literary figures who were both influenced by the English naturalist Gilbert White. In Part 1, Hall examines evidence that as Romantic naturalists interested in meteorology, Wordsworth and Emerson engaged in proto-environmental activity that drew attention to the potential consequences of the locomotive's incursion into Windermere and Concord. In Part 2, Hall suggests that Wordsworth and Emerson shaped the early environmental movement through their work as poets-turned-naturalists, arguing that Wordsworth influenced Octavia Hill's contribution to the founding of the United Kingdom's National Trust in 1895, while Emerson inspired John Muir to spearhead the United States' National Parks movement in 1890. Hall's book traces the connection from White as a naturalist-turned-poet to Muir as the quintessential early environmental activist who camped in Yosemite with President Theodore Roosevelt. Throughout, Hall raises concerns about the growth of industrialization to make a persuasive case for literature's importance to the rise of environmentalism.

First published in 1984, this biography gives an account of Jonathan Swift s political ideas and provides a critical commentary on his major works. With its emphasis on Swift as a political writer, the title offers a revision of the prevailing view of Swift s politics and its application in the study of his works. Alan Downie argues that in terms of the party politics of the day Swift is neither a Whig nor Tory. Swift thought of himself as an Old Whig, and said he was of the old Whig principles, without the modern articles and refinements . Downie shows how Swift s writings consistently make political points about society s deviation from an ideal. As Swift s views on morality, religion and politics are so closely linked, an understanding of his political ideas is vital; this reissue provides a detailed analysis of this aspect of Swift s writings and views, and as such will be of great interest to any students researching his satire. "

The scholars who have contributed to this book were asked to take part in a collaborative act of demystification, a reconsideration of the eschatological ideas of the 1890s in the light of the critical thought of the 1990s. Their essays draw upon a range of approaches, and are broadly interdisciplinary. All are characterized by the realization that, with a century's hindsight, the late 1800s should be seen not so much as a period of decadence as of discovery and growth.

Bodies and Machines is a striking and persuasive examination of the body-machine complex and its effects on the modern American cultural imagination. Bodies and Machines, first published in 1992, explores the links between techniques of representation and social and scientific technologies of power in a wide range of realist and naturalist discourses and practices. Seltzer draws on realist and naturalist writing, such as the work of Hawthorne and Henry James, and the discourses which inform it: from scouting manuals and the programmes of systematic management to accounts of sexual biology and the rituals of consumer culture. He explores other mass-produced and mass-consumed cultural forms, including visual representations such as composite photographs, scale models, and the astonishing iconography of standardization.

When Machines Play Chopin brings together music aesthetics, performance practices, and the history of automated musical instruments in nineteenth-century German literature. Philosophers defined music as a direct expression of human emotion while soloists competed with one another to display machine-like technical perfection at their instruments. When Machines Play Chopin looks at this paradox between thinking about and practicing music to show what three literary works say about automation and the sublime in art.

Ambrose Bierce was born in 1842 and mysteriously disappeared in 1914. During his lifetime, he was a controversial and prolific writer, and there is growing interest in his works. As a Union soldier during the Civil War, he witnessed bloodshed and the atrocities of battle. After the war, he began a career as a journalist in San Francisco, where many of his newspaper columns were filled with venom and daring. In addition, he wrote war stories and tales of the supernatural, along with an assortment of poems. Today, he is probably best remembered as the author of "The Devil's Dictionary, " originally published as "The Cynic's Dictionary" in 1906. This reference is a guide to his life and writings.

An opening essay overviews Bierce's contribution to literature and journalism, and a chronology summarizes the most important events in his life. The bulk of the Companion comprises alphabetically arranged entries on Bierce's major works and characters and on historical persons and writers who figured prominently in his life and career. Thus the volume provides coverage of Bierce's contemporaries, many of whom he satirized in his scathing newspaper columns. Many of the entries list works for further reading, and the book closes with a selected, general bibliography. Because of Bierce's concern with so many issues of his day, the volume offers a valuable perspective on American culture during the time in which he lived.

The study of Ruskin's work and influence is now a feature of several critical disciplines. New Approaches to Ruskin, first published in 1981, reflects this, gathering some of the most distinguished writers on Ruskin and joining them with others who have undertaken significant research in the field of Ruskin studies. The authors were all specially commissioned for this volume and were chosen to represent as wide a variety of approaches as possible to this key figure of nineteenth-century culture. This book is ideal for students of art history.

New essays offering fresh glimpses of Romanticism as interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic, illuminating the discursive features and the pan-European nature of the movement. Romanticism bubbled up as lava from such historical eruptions as the Napoleonic Wars. The power of its flow across disciplines and linguistic borders reminds us that the use of the term in a context limited to one linguistic, national, or political tradition, or to one discipline or area of human development, shows an essential ignorance of the ideational configurations elaborated and lived out by the movement. Among its consistent norms are the notion ofreality as a transcendent self-unfolding Geist, everything existing in a dialectical relationship with all else; the position that art reveals mythic understructures of reality; and that all kinds of kinship are more normalthan isolation. This book brings together essays that highlight the inclusivity of Romanticism. A team of eleven scholars offers fresh glimpses of Romanticism as it manifests itself in a number of disciplines, including most prominently literature, but also music, painting, and the sciences. In so doing, the contributors treat Romanticism as interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic, providing data and interpretive viewpoints that illuminate the discursive features and the pan-European nature of the movement. Contributors: Lloyd Davies, Ellis Dye, Stacey Hahn, Hollie Markland Harder, Jennifer Law-Sullivan, Sarah Lippert, Marjean D. Purinton, Ashley Shams, Kaitlin Gowan Southerly. Larry H. Peer is Professor of Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University. Christopher R. Clason is Professor of German at Oakland University.

This inspiring survey challenges conventional ways of viewing the Victorian novel. This book: provides time maps and overviews of historical and social contexts; considers the relationship between the Victorian novel and historical, religious and bibliographic writing; features short biographies of over forty Victorian authors, including Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Robert Louis Stevenson; offers close readings of over 30 key texts, among them Charlotte Bront's "Jane Eyre" (1847) and Bram Stoker's "Dracula" (1897), as well as key presences, such as John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" (Pt 1, 1676, Pt 2, 1684); and, also covers topics such as colonialism, scientific speculation, the psychic and the supernatural, and working class reading.

"Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies" is a comprehensive guide to recent critical approaches. Topics covered include Gay Studies, Feminist Criticism, Material Culture, Religion, Philosophy, Performance Studies, Aestheticism, Biography, Textual Studies and Postcolonial Theory. The book is designed to acquaint readers of all levels with the history of scholarship in a range of fields and suggest ways that Wilde's work offer new areas for research. The collection also provides a chronology and detailed bibliography.

Northanger Abbey was one of Jane Austen's earliest manuscripts; Persuasion was her last. Published together in a single volume after her death, the two books differ widely. Northanger Abbey is a spirited, Gothic parody, while Persuasion has increasingly been seen as a new direction for the Austen canon. The two texts have been widely analysed and debated since publication, and continue to be so today. In this Readers' Guide, Enit Karafili Steiner: - Delineates a clear trajectory through the books' many interpretations over two centuries, mapping these out thematically and chronologically. - Contextualises and brings into dialogue influential approaches such as psychoanalytical criticism, structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, New Historicism, and feminism. - Discusses film adaptations of the novels and their relation to literary criticism.

This is the perfect study guide to Shelley's classic gothic novel, "Frankenstein" - a key text for introductory literature courses at undergraduate level.Mary Shelley's classic gothic novel, "Frankenstein", is one of the most widely studied and read novels in English Literature. Aside from its key position in the English Literature canon and its wide cultural influence, the novel has been the subject of a vast array of interpretations and so leaves students needing guidance through this maze of reading.This guide offers an authoritative, up-to-date guide for students, introducing its context, language, themes, criticism and afterlife, leading students to a more sophisticated understanding of the text. It is the ideal guide to reading and studying the novel, setting "Frankenstein" in its historical, intellectual and cultural contexts, offering analyses of its themes, style and structure, providing exemplary close readings and presenting an up-to-date account of its critical reception.It also includes an introduction to "Frankenstein's" substantial history as an adapted text on stage and screen and its wider influence in film and popular culture. It includes points for discussion, suggestions for further study and an annotated guide to relevant reading."Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

This varied set presents a rich selection of renowned and lesser-known treatments of the Russian masters - considered by some the greatest novelists of all time - from the 1920s through to the '90s. Routledge Library Editions: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky includes works of accessible biography, lucid literary criticism and insightful scholarship, investigating a wide range of themes: Tolstoy's aesthetic philosophy, Dostoevsky' curiously under-studied social and political views, Feminism, Nietzsche, and much else.

This new volume demonstrates the extent and diversity of Coleridge's writings on the sublime. It highlights the development of his aesthetic of transcendence from an initial emphasis on the infinite progressiveness of humanity, through a fascination with landscape as half-revealing the infinite forces underlying it, and with literature as producing a similar feeling of the inexpressible, to an increasing emphasis on contemplating the ineffable nature of God, as well as the transcendent power of Reason or spiritual insight.