A materialist account of Wilde's writing career, based on publishing contracts and other documentation as well as detailed evidence of how he composed, this book argues that Wilde was not driven by an oppositional politics, nor was he an aesthetic 'purist'. Rather, he was thoroughly immersed in the contemporary 'commodification of culture' in which books became product. His writing practices, including his 'plagiarism', reflected the pragmatism of a professional.

Kimberley Reynolds and Nicola Humble here provide a radical revision of Victorian constructions of femininity. Using a wide range of textual examples (including children's literature, sensations fiction, diaries, and autobiography) as well as visual illustrations, Victorian Heroines offers a new look at the representation of women and sexuality in nineteenth-century literature and painting.

Arguing against the conventional dyadic model that interprets Victorian fiction in terms of a rigid distinction between the good and bad, the sexual and asexual woman, the authors suggest a more complex paradigm, simultaneously concealing and revealing contradictory attitudes to Victorian womanhood.

The book explores the highly erotic fantasy elements frequently found in widely disseminated orthodox female images, and effectively demonstrates how both male and female writers used similar techniques to subvert this orthodoxy. Drawing on contemporary critical and cultural theories, "Victorian Heroines" is a lucid and accessible analysis of the depiction of women during this period, challenging the prevalent views of recent decades.

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.

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.

The first study of the depictions of the Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian stage, this book analyzes plays set in and dramatising the histories of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Babylon and the Holy Land. In doing so, it seeks to locate theatre within the wider culture, tracing its links and interaction with other cultural forms.

Considering Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector's literature as a case study and a source of theory, Writing by Ear presents an aural theory of the novel based on readings of Near to the Wild Heart (1943), The Besieged City (1949), The Passion According to G.H. (1964), Agua Viva (1973), The Hour of the Star (1977), and A Breath of Life (1978). What is the specific aesthetic for which listening-in-writing calls? What is the relation that listening-in-writing establishes with silence, echo, and the sounds of the world? How are we to understand authorship when writers present themselves as objects of reception rather than subjects of production? In which ways does the robust oral and aural culture of Brazil shape literary genres and forms? In addressing these questions, Writing by Ear works in dialogue with philosophy, psychoanalysis, and sound studies to contemplate the relationship between orality and writing. Citing writers such as Machado de Assis, Oswald de Andrade and Joao Guimaraes Rosa, as well as Mia Couto and Toni Morrison, Writing By Ear opens up a broader dialogue on listening and literature, considering the aesthetic, ethical, and ecological reverberations of the imaginary. Writing by Ear is concerned at once with shedding light on the narrative representation of listening and with a broader reconceptualization of fiction through listening, considering it an auditory practice that transcends the dichotomy of speech and writing.

This biography contains new disclosures and interpretations of evidence, neglecting nothing significant in Hardy's early years, and providing the relevant details of his later life. It draws from a variety of sources including his published writings, biographies of Hardy and his contemporaries, correspondence of friends and acquaintances, Emma Hardy's diaries, and many unpublished letters from her and Florence Hardy. Apart from a brief background introduction to Hardy's friends and how these influenced his career, this book adopts an analysis of Hardy and his literary work and interests. The division between him and Emma is a dominant issue of this analysis. Dr Pinion is the author of A Jane Austen Companion, A Commentary on the Poems of Thomas Hardy and A Wordsworth Companion.

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.

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.

From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell is the first book to consider seriously the hugely popular and influential works of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Nag Marsh, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. Providing studies of 42 key novels, this volume introduces these authors for students and the general reader in the context of their lives, and of critical debates on gender, colonialism, psychoanalysis, the Gothic, and feminism. It includes interviews with P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine.

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.

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.

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.

"Consuming Texts" explores the history of reading in the British Isles during a period in which the printed word became all pervasive. Beginning with an overview of recent work, it goes on to provide a series of case studies of individual readers and the communities to which they belonged. From wealthy readers of 'amatory fiction' in the early Eighteenth century, through to men and women reading surreptitiously at the Victorian railway bookstall, it argues that a variety of new reading communities emerged during this period.

The first modern study of Hartley Coleridge, showing that he deserves our attention not as the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but as a literary presence in his own right.

Focusing on Shelley's 'Italian experience', the present study both addresses itself to the living context which nurtured Shelley's creativity, and explores a neglected but essential component of his work. The poet's four years of self-exile in Italy (1818-1822) were, in fact, the most decisive of his career. As he responded to Italy, his poetry acquired a new subtlety and complexity of vision. Endowed with remarkably keen powers of absorption, the poet imaginatively reshaped the rich cultural heritage of Italy and the vital qualities of its landscape and climate.

For more than thirty years, books and essays on Thomas Hardy have been at the forefront of developments in academic literary studies. This collection brings together exciting new readings of Hardy's work by established and emerging critics which also reflect on continuities and changes in contemporary literary studies. Covering a wide range of topics and approaches, "Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies" shows how Hardy's writing continues to provoke its readers to re-examine important issues in literary criticism and critical and cultural theory. Contributors include Terry Eagleton and J. Hillis Miller.

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.

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.

This book takes up the utopian desire for a perfect language of words giving direct expression to the real, known in Western thought as Cratylism, and its impact on the social visions and poetic projects of three of the most intellectually ambitious of American writers: Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson. A coda looks at the work of the Language writers, who carry forward this tradition in surprising ways. Based on close readings of theoretical and poetic texts, and drawing on archival research, this book makes two basic claims: that belief in an intrinsic relationship between words and things is linked in American poetry to utopian social projects; and that poets with a deep understanding of how language operates are nonetheless attracted to this belief--despite recognizing its fantastic elements--because it allows them to articulate a social mandate for poetry.

Of interest to interdisciplinary historians as well as those in various other fields, this book presents the first publication of 14 poems ranging from 12 to 3,000 lines. The poems are printed in the chronological order of their composition, from Elizabethan to Augustan times, but nine of them are verse translations of works from earlier periods in the development of alchemy. Each has a textual and historical introduction and explanatory note by the Editor. Renaissance alchemy is acknowledged as an important element in the histories of early modern science and medicine. This book emphasises these poems' expression of and shaping influence on religious, social and political values and institutions of their time too and is a useful reference work with much to offer for cultural studies and literary studies as well as science and history.

William Blake has maintained an enduring popularity amongst a large and diverse audience as a poet, artist and engraver. There are probably more artists, writers, filmmakers and composers working under the influence of Blake than any other figure from the Romantic era.Radical Blake traces his influence and afterlife across a range of major themes such as Metropolitan Blake, Blake and Nationalism, and Blake and Women.

A ground-breaking study of how literature both reflected and contributed to the eclipse and subsequent revival of militarism in the nineteenth century. Focusing on four major disputes in the Crimea, India, the Sudan, and South Africa as well as the role of the army in Britain, John Peck examines how Victorian writers responded to military issues. At the heart of the book is a dilemma that characterises the Victorian period: the impossibility of reconciling imperial aggression with liberal domestic values.

'The Empire of Stereotypes' places Germaine de Stael's influential novel, 'Corrine, or Italy' (1807) in relation to preceding and subsequent stereotypes of Italy as seen in the works of Northern European and American travel writers since the Renaissance."