"Over the last decade, Romanticism and queer theory have been mutually illuminating and incredibly productive, but this canonical 'queering' has somehow veered away from William Blake. This collection looks anew at Blake's celebrated sexual visions, to see how they might appear once compulsory heterosex has been ditched as an interpretative norm"--Provided by publisher.

This book is a study of obscene print culture in nineteenth-century Britain. Colette Colligan argues that nineteenth-century obscenity was caught up in the global cultural traffic of print technology, international trade, and exoticism. Her analysis of select canonical and non-canonical publications reveals that obscenity intersected majority and minority culture, circulated from the farthest reaches of empire back to the metropolis, searched out new print and visual media, and built commercial and fantasmatic global networks for its continuation and survival.

Romantics and Renegades examines the abiding crux of romantic criticism: the political apostasies of the Lake poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey) as they renounced the revolutionary Jacobinism of their youth in the 1790s in order to claim the high ground of Regency Toryism in the 1810s. Central to this scandal is the figure of William Hazlitt, the literary critic who policed their betrayals in his vigilant exposure of their political and poetical inconsistencies. Mahoney's analysis provides new insight into this abiding critical riddle through close historical and figural readings of the rhetoric of romantic apostasy.

Blake said of his works, 'Tho' I call them Mine I know they are not Mine'. So who owns Blake? Blake has always been more than words on a page. This volume takes Blake 2.0 as an interactive concept, examining digital dissemination of his works and reinvention by artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers across a variety of twentieth-century media.

Sensation fiction emerged in the 1860s, and immediately generated alarm as many critics viewed the genre as a threat to prevailing Victorian values. Charles Reade, along with Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, was among the most well-known sensation novelists. With its explicit critique of power relations in the fields of medicine, criminal justice, and sexual mores, Reade's work anticipates Michel Foucault's theories elaborated a century later. Reade's work also provides rare glimpses of alternative sexualities and gender identities in nineteenth-century fiction. This book recovers the fiction of Charles Reade as a body of work that anticipates recent trends in literary and cultural theory.

This novel is a designedly political document. Written at the time of the Hastings impeachment and set in the period of Hastings's Orientalist government, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) represents a dramatic delineation of the Anglo-Indian encounter. The novel constitutes a significant intervention in the contemporary debate concerning the nature of Hastings's rule of India by demonstrating that it was characterised by an atmosphere of intellectual sympathy and racial tolerance. Within a few decades the Evangelical and Anglicising lobbies frequently condemned Brahmans as devious beneficiaries of a parasitic priestcraft, but Phebe Gibbes's portrayal of Sophia's Brahman and the religion he espouses represent a perception of India dignified by a sympathetic and tolerant attempt to dispel prejudice. -- .

This exploration into the development of women's self-defence from 1850 to 1914 features major writers, including H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Robins and Richard Marsh, and encompasses an unusually wide-ranging number of subjects from hatpin crimes to the development of martial arts for women.

Mary Shelly's life (1797-1851) divides in to three main stages: her childhood, her time with Percy Bysshe Shelley from 1817, and her long widowhood from 1822. This chronology follows the experiences and activities of all three stages, the genesis and publications of her writings (Frankenstein and much else), her travels, friendships, and relationships with other major figures of the Romantic period.

Modernist Writers and the Marketplace is a new research-level collection devoted to an exciting area in the history of the book. Focusing on Henry James, W.B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and the culture of the little magazine of the period, eleven contributors from six countries demonstrate new developments in the sociology of texts, the practice of literary biography, and textual criticism.

This bibliography of more than 2,000 monographs in twenty languages covers the period 1839-1999. Entries range from those that explore the relationship between photography and literature, to words where the literary text is complemented by photographs. It includes books, exhibition catalogues, dissertations, and special issues of magazines, with brief annotations where appropriate. The book is arranged alphabetically by author/photographer, with numerous cross-references and cumulative name and subject indexes.

John Sherman is the only work of realistic fiction Yeats ever completed. The novelette contains many biographical elements and is of interest for its treatment of Yeats's recurring themes. It examines the debate between nationality and cosmopolitan and looks at the conflict between the self and the Anti-self. Dhoya depicts a liaison between a mortal and a fairy, a motif that recurs in Yeats's poetry and other works. The texts are supplemented by an introduction and detailed explanatory notes by the editor, Richard Finneran.

The bicentenary of the foundation of the Edinburgh Review has provided the foremost scholars in the field with the opportunity to re-examine the pervasive significance of the most important literary review of the Romantic period. These essays assess the controversial role played by the Edinburgh Review in the development of Romantic literature and explore its sense of "Scottishness" in the context of early 19th century British culture.

Edwardian Shaw covers Shaw's campaigns and crusades in the crucial first ten years of the century, when his career hung in the balance. By going to contemporary documents and highlighting aspects of Shaw's career at this time, particularly his emergence as a moral revolutionary and playwright of original and disquieting power, Leon Hugo depicts a man who confronted a highly conservative world and managed by the force of his genius to stamp his personality on the age.

In this study of Kafka's encounter with Dostoyevsky, literary historiography is embedded within the task of interpretation. In a series of detailed readings of Kafka's works from "The Judgment" to "The Trial" and other works from late 1914, a narrative unfolds of Dostoyevsky being used both as a guide and a foil. Kafka's appropriations of the Dostoyevskian world are traced from the sympatheic emulations of the "poor folk" Dostoyevsky to problematical and parodic refractions of Dostoyevsky's religious universe.;Dostoyevsky's biography features as prominently here as his literary work, and it is contended that Kafka's response is driven not only by sympathy and empathy but also, and increasingly, by a dissenting critique of Dostoyevskian idealism. Drawing on contemporary sources and recent scholarly work, including the historical-critical edition of "The Trial", this study insists on the socio-political aspect of Kafka's fiction and examines the tensions in Kafka's work between religious and secular perspectives.

Against a historical backdrop that includes eighteenth-century language theory, children's literature and education, debates on the French Revolution, Biblical interpretation, and print culture, "Blake on Language, Power, and Self-Annihilation" breaks new ground in the study of William Blake. This book analyzes the concept of self-annihilation in Blake’s work, using the language theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to elucidate the ways in which his discourse was open to the viewpoints of others, undermines institutional authority, and restores dialogue. This book not only uncovers the importance of self-annihilation to Blake's thinking about language and communication, but it also develops its centrality to Blake's poetic practice.

Ghost stories are always in conversation with novelistic modes with which they are contemporary. This book examines examples fromSir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Henry James andRudyard Kipling, amongst others, to the end of the twentieth century, looking at how they address empire, class, property, history and trauma.

Beginning with the publication of the first Murray guidebook to Greece in 1840 and ending with Virginia Woolf's journey to Athens, this book offers a genealogy of British women's travel literature about Greece. Churnjeet Mahn recounts the women's first-hand experiences of the sites and sights of antiquity, analyzing travel accounts by archaeologists, ethnographers, journalists, and tourists to chart women's renderings of Modern Greece through a series of discursive lenses. Mahn's offers insights into the importance of the Murray and Baedeker guidebooks; how knowledge of Greece and Classical Studies were used to justify colonial rule of India at the same time that Agnes Smith Lewis and Jane Ellen Harrison used Greece as a symbol of women's emancipation; British women's production of the first anthropological accounts of Modern Greece; and fin-de-siecle women who asserted their right to see and claim antiquity at the same time that the safety of the independent lady traveler was being called into question by the media.

Against the backdrop of Britain’s underground 18th and early-19th century homosexual culture, mob persecutions, and executions of homosexuals, Hobson shows how Blake's hatred of sexual and religious hypocrisy and state repression, and his revolutionary social vision, led him gradually to accept homosexuality as an integral part of human sexuality. In the process, Blake rejected the antihomosexual bias of British radical tradition, revised his idealization of aggressive male heterosexuality and his male-centered view of gender, and refined his conception of the cooperative commonwealth.

This book, first published in 1986, explores the allusions in Dickens's work, such as current events and religious and intellectual issues, social customs, topography, costume, furniture and transportation. Together with an analysis of Dickens's imaginative responses to his culture, and their place in the genesis and composition of the text, this book is a full-scale, thoroughgoing annotation that The Mystery of Edwin Drood requires.

New Perspectives on Thomas Hardy is a lively and varied collection of new essays on Thomas Hardy, contributed by some of the world's leading Hardy scholars. The essays range widely over Hardy's work, thought, creative methods and life, and show a variety of critical approaches. The essays collected here will appeal equally to scholars, students and non-academic Hardy enthusiasts.

William Blake and the Body re-evaluates Blake's central image: the human form. In Blake's designs, transparent-skinned bodies passionately contort; in his verse, metamorphic bodies burst from each other in gory, gender-bending births. The culmination is an ideal body uniting form and freedom. Connolly explores romantic-era contexts like anatomical art, embryology, miscarriage, and 20th century theorists like those of Kristeva, Douglas, and Girard to provide an innovative new analysis of Blake's transformations of body and identity.

Why were the Victorians so passionate about "History"? How did this passion relate to another Victorian obsession - the "woman question"? In a brilliant and provocative study, Christina Crosby investigates the links between the Victorians' fascination with "history" and with the nature of "women." Discussing both key novels and non-literary texts - Daniel Deronda and Hegel's Philosophy of History; Henry Esmond and Macaulay's History of England; Little Dorrit, Wilkie Collins' The Frozen Deep, and Mayhew's survey of "labour and the poor"; Villette, Patrick Fairburn's The Typology of Scripture and Ruskin's Modern Painters - she argues that the construction of middle-class Victorian "man" as the universal subject of history entailed the identification of "women" as those who are before, beyond, above, or below history. Crosby's analysis raises a crucial question for today's feminists - how can one read historically without replicating the problem of nineteenth century "history"? The book was first published in 1991.