Oscar Wilde's Salome and Andre Gide's Saul have been considered critically in the traditional contexts of authorial oeuvre, biography, or "thought." These plays have been treated with embarrassed respect, dealt with only because of the importance of their authors. That Wilde and Gide made use of biblical material seems to discomfit their critics; that they had done so at a time when biblical drama was prohibited has rarely been addressed. Traditional critical treatments seek to smooth over the plays' aberrant qualities. This study takes them seriously as aberrations and investigates Wilde's and Gide's claims that these plays are works of faith, by considering them as participating in the history of biblical drama.

This is the first English translation of Le Roman social en Angleterre by Louis Cazamian, which is widely recognized as the classic survey of Victorian social fiction.

Starting from the eighteenth century, Cazamian traces the ways in which rationalism and romanticism intertwined and competed, particularly in relation to radical political philosophy. He shows how industrialization polarized England, setting the industrial bourgeoisie in the van of progress in the first decades of the nineteenth century, until their political and economic triumph stirred up a passionate reaction against them. This reaction propelled novelists such as Charles Dickens who lies at the centre of his discussion.

For this translation Martin Fido has provided a substantial foreword, and has revised and completed the bibliographical references and corrected the footnotes to assist the present-day reader.

This book describes Charles Dickens as an ordinary man who by being perfectly tuned to the public taste developed into a master of his art. The clue to this paradox lies, in the author 's opinion, in Dickens obsession with such topics as money, crowds and prisons which touch the life of everyone. From the deep fears of his childhood they became the main food for his imagination. As his creative mind worried over them, so his art developed. This process provided the driving force behind his work, and is at the root of his greatness as an artist.

Although enjoyed my many as a masterpiece of Dickens comic writing, Martin Chuzzlewit has long been underrated by professional critics. This volume redresses the balance by devoting its attention to a full critical discussion of the novel and by including a full survey of the critical positions held in the past.

As well as discussing the themes of selfishness and hypocrisy, the history of the text is also explored, as is the complex relationship between Dickens and the United States which played a great part in the development of the novel and exerted considerable influence on it early reception.

This text analyzes how writing over the period of a century justified and was affected by the introduction and extension of British domination of India, demonstrating the link between written representations and the ideological, economic and political climate, and debates. By showing how the representations of Britons in India, Indian religion and Indian society and government evolved over the period 1740 to 1840, the book fills the gap between the early colonial "exotic East" and the later "primitive subject nation" perceptions.

This text examines the male Romantics' versions of poetic authority in theory and practice in the context of their involvement in the political debates of Regency Britain and argues that their response to Burke's gendered discourse about power effected radical changes in the definitions of masculinity and femininity. It portrays their influence on each other as a series of unstable struggles and alliances in which the formulation of an authoritative masculinity was a political as well as an aesthetic issue. The author investigates the writers' portrayals of women and their collaborations with women writers and throws new light on their nature poetry by relating it to their reactions to the sexual and political scandals of the Regency.

This new volume of essays examines the relationship between Catholicism and homosexuality. Why did so many literary Modernists embrace Catholicism? What is their relationship between historical homophobia and contemporary struggles between the Church and the homosexual? Moving from the Gothic to the late Twentieth-century, from Britain to America and France, "Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives" interrogates what is queer about Catholicism and what is modern about homosexuality. The result is a radical revision of the sacred - in life and art, the body and devotion.

Tracks the emergence and vicissitudes of attitudes to wrongdoing in Spain from the 19th century through the decades before the Civil War. The international contributors to this volume explore the rich diversity of cultures and representations of wrongdoing in Spain through the 19th century and the decades up to the Civil War. Their line of enquiry is predicated on the belief that cultural constructions of wrongdoing are far from simple reflections of historical or social realities, and that they reveal not a line of historical development, but rather variation and movement. Voices and discourses arise in response to the social phenomena associated with wrongdoing. They set out to persuade, to shock, to entice, and in so doing provide complex windows on to social aspiration and desire. The book's three sections (Realities, Representations, and Reactions) offer distinct points of focus, and move between areas where control is paramount and on the agenda from above and those where the subtleties of emotional response take pride of place. Alison Sinclair was Professor of Modern Spanish Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge until retirement in 2014. Samuel Llano is a Lecturer in Spanish Cultural Studies at the Universityof Manchester.

Women's Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain is the first book to make a comprehensive study of women playwrights in the British theatre from 1820 to 1918. It looks at how women playwrights negotiated their personal and professional identities as writers, and examines the female tradition of playwriting which dramatises the central experience of women's lives around the themes of home, the nation, and the position of women in marriage and the family. The book also includes an extensive Appendix of authors and plays, which will be a useful reference tool for students and scholars in nineteenth-century studies and theatre historians.

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

This innovative new study examines the significance given to the country house in Ireland under the Union and how this is represented in the works of Edgeworth, Lever, Trollope, Martin and Somerville, Bowen, and Lady Gregory. The Irish country house is set in a classical and European context as the center for "the good life" and the pinnacle of "civilization." In Ireland, that inherited tradition was challenged by an alternative culture nominated as "savage." This book explores how the Irish country house was the focus of conflict between and symbiosis of the two views.

Reading the Sphinx unearths buried conflicts in religion, myth, and the memory of Egypt in the West, illuminating issues of identity, inheritance, gender, and sexuality through cultural productions ranging from Herodotus to Freud.

In his 1889 novella The Kreutzer Sonata Lev Tolstoy declared war on human sexuality. Having fathered thirteen children by his wife and at least two children by peasant women, the great Russian writer now has the arrogance to suggest that people should stop having children. Psychoanalysis of Tolstoy's diaries and other private materials reveals that Tolstoy's anti-sex position was grounded in a sadistic attitude towards women (including his wife Sonia) and a punishing, masochistic attitude towards himself. These feelings, in turn, were related to the trauma of maternal loss in Tolstoy's early childhood.

This collection of essays offers a comparative study of the naturalist movement that dominated European literary culture in the second half of the 19th century. The volume focuses on three aspects of the movement, its poetics, its reception, and finally the literary texts. The contributors discuss works by authors including Emile Zola, Emilia Pardo Bazan, Leopoldo Alas, Thomas Mann, and Henry James.

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.

The British Romantic poets were among the first to realize the centrality of the "Divine Comedy" for the evolution of the European epic. This study explores the significance of Dante for Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and William Blake. What was their idea of Dante? Why did they feel the need to approach his Christian epic on the afterlife? This study aims to answer these questions by focusing on the three poets' preoccupation with form and language.

The first complete edition of the works of Robert Browning with variant readings and annotations contains: 1. The entire contents of the first editions of Browning's work; 2. All prefaces and dedications which Browning wrote for his own works and for those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and others; 3. The two prose essays: The Essay on Chatterton and The Essay on Shelley; 4. The front matter and tables of contents of each of the collected editions (1849, 1863, 1865, 1868, 1888-1889) which Browning himself saw through the press; 5 Poems by Browning published during his lifetime but not collected by him; 9. Poems not published during Browning's lifetime which have come to light since his death; 7. John Forster's Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford to which Browning contributed significantly, though to what precise extent has not been determined. The edition provides a full apparatus, including variant readings and annotations.

The first book-length critical analysis of its kind, Edith Wharton's Travel Writing is an engaging study of Wharton's travel writing as the embodiment of her connoisseurship. Wright reveals how Wharton enacted a new dialectic of tourism by reconstituting what Blake Nevius calls the 'aesthetic spectra' in her travel texts. Wharton abandoned the examples set by American predecessors such as Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who led the 'artless travelers' of her parents' day to lakes, waterfalls, mountains, and ruins echoing sentimental legends and chose to emulate John Ruskin's precise visual observation and Bernard Berenson's scientific methods of appraisal.

This is the first book of its kind to consider at length Coleridge's relationship to his near contemporary, Friedrich Schiller. Contrary to received opinion, the author shows that Schiller's notion of 'aesthetic education' was indeed valuable to Coleridge at an early stage in his career and that it helped to shape much of his work - from his theory of imagination and his notion of the clerisy to his views on women and his account of historical change. Combining close readings with historical research, this book challenges readers to rethink the radical potential of idealist aesthetics.

This book offers an exciting reassessment of Keats with particular emphasis on gender identity and sexuality. Traditionally, Keats has been more readily associated with the 'feminine' than any other canonical male English poet. This feminization was always likely, given his tragically early death and the mythologizing which took place soon after. In contrast, John Whale explores Keats's writings from the perspective of masculinity and gender by placing them in the context of contemporary friendship groupings and coterie relationships. Whale addresses all the major poems and gives due prominence to the letters. In so doing, he offers a new understanding of Keats's exploration of poetry, gender and desire, and provides an extended analysis of Keats's quest for poetic fame in the face of the often conflicting forces of love and sexuality. Clear, concise and insightful, this is an essential guide to one of the best-known Romantic poets.

Ridiculous Critics is an anthology of eighteenth-century writings on the figure of the literary critic, the newly terrifying censor, the opinionated or foolish drudge who becomes centrally important in the literary world as the mediator between writers and the literary public, inspiring fear, ridicule and wild compensatory imaginings. The collection of critical texts and satirical images is assembled chronologically to reform our vision of the history of eighteenth-century literary criticism. The passages reproduced are taken from critics, poets, novelists and literary commentators celebrated and obscure; they range through poetry, fiction, drama, and periodical writing. The anthology is accompanied by two original essays explaining and illustrating the irrepressible spirit of critical ridicule in the period, and commending its value and effect. Of these essays, the first offers an evaluation of the merciless and sometimes shockingly venomous satirical attacks on critical habits and personalities of the eighteenth century. The editors argue that such attacks are reflexive, in the sense that literature and criticism become increasingly supple and able to observe and examine their own limitless, irresponsible ingenuities from within. The volume s concluding essay supplies an analysis of modern modes of criticism and critical history, and makes comparisons or suggests applications across time. The eighteenth-century mockery of critics is shown to cast light on a neglected common thread in the history of criticism and its recent manifestations; it prompts questions about the relative absence of comedy from the stories we presently tell about critics dead or alive. The passages invite laughter both with the critics and at their expense, and they suggest the place that ridicule (both verbal and visual) might have had since the eighteenth century in the making of judgments, and in the pricking of critical portentousness and pretension. For this reason, they indicate the role that laughter may still have in criticism today and provide an encouraging precedent for more of it."

Robert Browning both denied and affirmed the value of biography for an understanding of literature. This book narrates the development of his controversial creative life through responses to his work by five key 19th-century figures: John Stuart Mill, William Charles Macready, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold. It also relates Browning's sense of literary vocation to Victorian publishing. Browning emerges as a writer vividly engaged with contemporary assumptions, yet deeply aware of the unaccountability of writing.

A broadly interdisciplinary work, this handbook discusses the best and most enduring literature related to the major topics and themes of World War II. Military historiography is treated in essays on the major theaters of military operations and the related themes of logistics and intelligence, while political and diplomatic history is covered in chapters on international relations, resistance movements, and collaboration. The volume analyzes themes of domestic history in essays on economic mobilization, the home fronts, and women in the military and civilian life. The book also covers the Holocaust.

This handbook approaches each topic from a global viewpoint rather than focusing on individual national communities. Except for nonprint material, the literature, research, and sources surveyed are primarily those available in English. The volume is aimed at both experts on the war and the general academic community and will also be useful to students and serious laymen interested in the war.