Dickens's multifacetedness as a writer and the wide range of his appeal to readers help to account for the extraordinarily large field of critical literature that has grown up in response to his work. Many anthologies of criticism devoted to particular works by Dickens have appeared, as have selections illustrating particular approaches to his writing or developments in criticism from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. However, the aim of this new series is to present a survey of the most important critical literature and key texts and thereby bring students and scholars up to date with developments at the forefront of research and provide a clear pathway through the mass of published material on Dickens. The six volumes in the series are organised around key thematic topics. Each volume is edited by a leading authority in the area who also provides a substantial introduction which surveys the current state of the field, identifies formative moments in its emergence, highlights important work and illustrates critical developments in relation to each theme. The essays and articles come from a variety of sources scattered across the globe, some of them now difficult to obtain. The volumes are published in hardcover and printed on acid-free paper suitable for library collections. This series reflects the international reach of Dickens scholarship, provides an authoritative selection of the best recent work and represents a significant resource for libraries and academics interested in easily locating the key modern literature published on Dickens. It is equally useful for scholars and students new to Dickens studies and experienced scholars who may have overlooked an important essay published in a journal with limited circulation.

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.

An annotated bibliography on women who wrote fiction in the US during the period 1790-1870. The first part is an annotated list of sources that discuss women's fiction in the period and women authors born before 1840 who published before 1870. The second part is an alphabetical list of the approximately 325 19th century writers who meet those criteria. There are indexes by pseudonym, editor, and subject. The sources provide information not only about the individual authors but also about the history of criticism and literary politics, especially women's place in the American literary canon.

This collection of essays, both feminist and historical, analyzes power relations between men and women in the Victorian period. This volume is the first to reshape Victorian studies from the perspective of the postmodern return to history, and is variously influenced by Marxism, sociology, anthropology, and post-structuralist theories of language and subjectivity. It analyzes the struggle for legitimacy and recognition in Victorian institutions and the struggle over meanings in ideological representation of the gendered subject in texts. Contributors cover diverse topics, including Victorian ideologies of motherhood, the male gaze, the cult of the male child genius in narrative painting, the press, and Victorian women and the French Revolution, discussing both well-known and less familiar Victorian texts.

Focusing on the ways in which female novelists have, in their creative work, challenged or scrutinised contemporary assumptions about their own sex, this book's critical interest in women's fiction shows how mid-nineteenth-century women writers confront the conflict between the pressures of matrimonial ideologies and the often more attractive alternative of single or professional life. In arguing that the tensions and dualities of their work represent the honest confrontation of their own ambivalence rather than attempted conformity to convention, it calls for a fresh look at patterns of imaginative representation in Victorian women's literature. Making extensive use of letters and non-fiction, this study relates the opinions expressed there to the themes and methods of the fictional narratives. The first chapter outlines the social and ideological framework within which the authors were writing; the subsequent five chapters deal with the individual novelists, Craik, Charlotte Bronte, Sewell, Gaskell, and Eliot, examining the works of each and also pointing to the similarities between them, thus suggesting a shared female 'voice'. Dealing with minor writers as well as better-known figures, it opens up new areas of critical investigation, claiming not only that many nineteenth-century female novelists have been undeservedly neglected but also that the major ones are further illuminated by being considered alongside their less familiar contemporaries.

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.

"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.

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.

In The Birth of Wuthering Heights , Edward Chitham explores the sources of Emily Bronte's inspiration and the ways in which she composed her poetry and her one major novel This key study discusses the probable content of her unfinished second novel and also makes use of new discoveries to show that Emily Bronte was not only well-read in the classics, but that she had also made her own translations of Virgil and Horace. It also foregrounds the publishing history of Wuthering Heights , revealing how the original text was almost doubled in size from its first submission to a publishers and its final acceptance. This book, published for the first time in paperback, provides a fascinating insight into Emily Bronte's mind and working methods.

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.

'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."

Gary Rosenshield offers a new interpretation of Dostoevsky's greatest novel, "The Brothers Karamazov." He explores Dostoevsky's critique and exploitation of the jury trial for his own ideological agenda, both in his journalism and his fiction, contextualizing his portrayal of trials and trial participants (lawyers, jurors, defendants, judges) in the political, social, and ideological milieu of his time. Further, the author presents Dostoevsky's critique in terms of the main notions of the critical legal studies movement in the United States, showing how, over one hundred and twenty years ago, Dostoevsky explicitly dealt with the same problems that the law-and-literature movement has been confronting over the past two decades. This book should appeal to anyone with an interest in Russian literature, Russian history and culture, legal studies, law and literature, narratology, or metafiction and literary theory.

Charlotte Yonge, a dedicated religious, didactic, and domestic novelist, has become one of the most effectively rediscovered Victorian women writers of the last decades. Her prolific output of fiction does not merely give a fascinatingly different insight into nineteenth-century popular culture; it also yields a startling complexity. This compels a reappraisal of the parameters that have long been limiting discussion of women writers of the time. Situating Yonge amidst developments in science, technology, imperialism, aesthetics, and the book market at her time, the individual contributions in this book explore her critical and often self-conscious engagement with current fads, controversies, and possible alternatives. Her marketing of her missionary stories, the wider significance of her contribution to Tractarian aesthetics, the impact of Darwinian science on her domestic chronicles, and her work as a successful editor of a newly established magazine show this self-confidently anti-feminist and domestic writer exert a profound influence on Victorian literature and culture. This book was previously published as a special issue of Women's Writing.

Though traditionally defined as a relatively brief time period - typically the half century of 1780-1830 - the "Romantic era" constitutes a crucial, indeed unique, transitional phase in what has come to be called "modernity," for it was during these fifty years that myriad disciplinary, aesthetic, economic, and political changes long in the making accelerated dramatically. Due in part to the increased velocity of change, though, most of modernity's essential master-tropes - such as secularization, instrumental reason, individual rights, economic self-interest, emancipation, system, institution, nation, empire, utopia, and "life" - were also subjected to incisive critical and methodological reflection and revaluation. The chapters in this collection argue that Romanticism's marked ambivalence and resistance to decisive conceptualization arises precisely from the fact that Romantic authors simultaneously extended the project of European modernity while offering Romantic concepts as means for a sustained critical reflection on that very process. Focusing especially on the topics of form (both literary and organic), secularization (and its political correlates, utopia and apocalypse), and the question of how one narrates the arrival of modernity, this collection collectively emphasizes the importance of understanding modernity through the lens of Romanticism, rather than simply understanding Romanticism as part of modernity. This book was previously published as a special issue of European Romantic Review.

An enhanced exam section: expert guidance on approaching exam questions, writing high-quality responses and using critical interpretations, plus practice tasks and annotated sample answer extracts. Key skills covered: focused tasks to develop your analysis and understanding, plus regular study tips, revision questions and progress checks to track your learning. The most in-depth analysis: detailed text summaries and extract analysis to in-depth discussion of characters, themes, language, contexts and criticism, all helping you to succeed.

This book examines the outbreak of print in late Victorian Britain. Analyzing categories in new and unique pairings, such as literature and popular culture; books and magazines; publishers and news agents; and media studies and media history, the chapters focus on authorship, production, illustration, and gender. The author uses archival material from publications such as Dickens, Pater, Ruskin, Eliot, Symons, and James, and magazines such as Master Humphrey's Clock, The Westminster Review, Artist and Journal of Home Culture, Publishers' Circular, Yellow book, and Savoy.

This studyargues that female networks of conversation, correspondenceand patronage formed the foundation for women's work in the 'higher' realms of Shakespeare criticism and poetry. Eger traces the transition between Enlightenment and Romantic culture, arguing for the relevance of rational argument in the history of women's writing.

First published in 1965, this reissue of the second edition of T. R. Henn's seminal study offers an impressive breadth and depth of meditations on the poetry of W. B. Yeats. His life and influences are discussed at length, from the impact of the Irish Rebellion upon his youth, to his training as a painter, to the influence of folklore, occultism and Indian philosophy on his work. Henn seeks out the many elements of Yeats' famously complex personality, as well as analysing the dominant symbols of his work, and their ramifications.

First published in 1965, this reissued work by Wendy Craik provides a thorough and extensive study of Jane Austen's six complete novels: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. This is a truly groundbreaking study of Austen which, in addition to a close analysis of the novels themselves, also goes on investigate the principles by which Jane Austen selected and arranged her material.

This four volume backlist collection brings together an array of criticism written about the works of Jane Austen, encompassing everything from a detailed analysis of her six published novels, through to an investigation of the heroines within her fiction, a re-evaluation of her political subtext and proto-feminism, and even a French appreciation of her work.

Published between 1924 and 1987, these four reissued works offer a thorough and engaging insight into Jane Austen and the canon of Austen criticism, which will appeal to the general reader as well as to undergraduates studying 19th Century English Literature and the rise of the novel.

These essays are arranged progressively to indicate Hardy's development as a writer and thinker, and to present the major aspects of his work as a whole, linking the poetry and the prose at all appropriate stages. They suggest that his formative thought, the product of a period of conflict between new scientific philosophy and humanism on the one hand, and traditional Christian theology combined with Victorian restraints on the other, developed when England was not as intellectually provincial as Matthew Arnold had affirmed. Above all, they illustrate the extent to which the creative imagination and the style of Hardy the writer were stimulated and strengthened by literary influences.

Thomas Hardy in the Literary Lives series relates Hardy's life to his career as a writer, giving particular attention to his determination as a young man to make literature his career, his methodical preparation during the first thirty years of his life for that career, the writing of his fourteen published novels and the fame they brought him, and then, the culmination of his life as writer, his emergence in his remaining thirty years as one of the very greatest of English poets and the writer of The Dynasts.

Romanticism was a revolutionary intellectual and artistic movement which generated some of the most popular and influential texts in British and American literary history. This clear and engaging guide introduces the history, major writers and critical issues of this crucial era. This fully updated second edition includes:

• Discussion of a broad range of writers including William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, H.D. Thoreau, Frederick Douglas
• A new chapter on American Romanticism
• Discussion of the romantic sublime or romantic imagination
• An engagement with critical debates such as postcolonialism, gender studies and ecocriticism.

First published in 1968, this reissue of Dr. Craik 's critical appreciation of the completed novels of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bront is seminal for the way in which it shifts emphasis away from the Bront family biography towards a detailed critical analysis of the novels themselves.

Separate chapters are given to each of the seven novels. The author 's aims and techniques in each are assessed and Dr. Craik shows what light the books throw on each other, how they are related to the novels of the Bront 's predecessors, and how the Bront novels compare with their great contemporaries in the nineteenth century novel.