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.

Drawing on recent theoretical developments in gender and men's studies, Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities shows how the ideas and models of masculinity were constructed in the work of artists and writers associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Paying particular attention to the representation of non-normative or alternative masculinities, the contributors take up the multiple versions of masculinity in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's paintings and poetry, masculine violence in William Morris's late romances, nineteenth-century masculinity and the medical narrative in Ford Madox Brown's Cromwell on His Farm, accusations of 'perversion' directed at Edward Burne-Jones's work, performative masculinity and William Bell Scott's frescoes, the representations of masculinity in Pre-Raphaelite illustration, aspects of male chastity in poetry and art, TannhAuser as a model for Victorian manhood, and masculinity and British imperialism in Holman Hunt's The Light of the World. Taken together, these essays demonstrate the far-reaching effects of the plurality of masculinities that pervade the art and literature of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

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.

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.

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.

This study is an examination of Baudelaire's art criticism and its relationship with his creative writing. It is the first book in English to treat in one volume the diverse aspects of the subject: the principal aesthetic ideas, the importance of Delacroix, Boudin, Meryon, Guys, and Manet, the essays on laughter and caricature, and the language and rhetoric of the Salons and other critical writings. The title reflects Baudelaire's conviction, which emphasizes in relation to Delacroix, Daumier, Guys, and Wagner, that all art, whether it is painting, poetry or music, springs from the memory of the artist and speaks to the memory of the consumer of that art. This idea, exemplified in his own creative writing, extends to criticism itself, which is seen primarily as a phenomenon of recognition, and it is that sense of recognition that the author has sought to emphasize throughout.

This book presents a unique sociological examination of British raciology, focusing on women's literary works of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It uniquely offers a sociological perspective drawing from a range of academic disciplines, particularly literature, history and cultural studies. Wright traces the emergence of British modernity through the writings of a select group of women writers (including Jane Austen, Hannah More, Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Marla Edgeworth) of diverse political and philosophical affiliations, and fills a gap in scholarship on feminist accounts of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women's writing.

Analyzing novels by women writers from the 1850s to the 1930s, this book argues that representations of mobility offer a fruitful way to explore the location of women within modernity and, specifically, the opportunities for (or limitations on) women's agency in this period, considering the mobility of the female subject in the city and beyond.

We celebrate Jane Austen as the mother of the English realist novel, but have you ever wondered why she insists on giving her mature heroines the 'perfect happiness' that can only be realized in the romance? Romancing Jane Austen asks the reader to consider Austen's happy endings as a 'prophetic' rather than merely 'illusory' answer to the contradiction that feminine subjectivity represents for history. It has a happy ending for the feminine subject. But that would be against all the empirical odds...

'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.

Tess O'Toole uncovers Hardy's career-long fascination with the points of intersection between genealogy and fiction and argues that this relationship fuels much of his writing. Hereditary patterns are the product of narrative compulsion; the circulation of the family story is necessary to reproduce the history it records. As well as analyzing Hardy's characteristic treatment of family history, this volume revises existing accounts of genealogical narrative, and in its conclusion considers the presence in other nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels of motifs foregrounded in Hardy's work.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.