This collection of essays examines the links between the images of death and sexuality in Victorian fiction and poetry. The contributors examine the ways in which fear of death was placed beside sexual desire and how Victorian writers managed to write about sex without overtly referring to it.;The essays include an examination of Count Dracula's eternal seductions, an exploration of the pairing of Eros and Thanatos in George Eliot's fiction and an exploration of the work of Ruskin. Some of the essays attempt to "undo" much of the preceding critical wisdom on the subject. The dialectics of sex and death, these critics claim, must be viewed as one of the most influential patterns in Victorian poetry and prose.;Regina Barreca has written "Punch Lines: Women, Comedy and Subversion in English and American Literature" and is editor of "Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy".

The empirical/evangelical dialectic of Romantic Anglo-America culminates in the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830-86). For example, just as her poems of science and technology reflect her faith in experience, and just as her lyrics about natural history build on this empiricism and develop her commitment to natural religion, so too do her poems of revealed religion constitute her experience of faith. Thus, for an American audience, Dickinson recasts British-Romantic themes of natural and spiritual perception. This double perspective, this counterintuitive combination of natural models with spiritual metaphors, parallels the androgynous ideal of her nineteenth-century feminism and champions her belief in immortality. The experience/faith paradox of her Late-Romantic imagination forms the mind and soul, as well as the heart, of her legacy.

Much has been written about the Victorian novel, and for good reason. The cultural power it exerted (and, to some extent, still exerts) is beyond question. The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to this thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics (the novel and science, the Victorian Bildungroman) as well as essays on topics often overlooked (the novel and classics, the novel and the OED, the novel, and allusion). Manifesting the increasing interdisciplinarity of Victorian studies, its essays situate the novel within a complex network of relations (among, for instance, readers, editors, reviewers, and the novelists themselves; or among different cultural pressures - the religious, the commercial, the legal). The handbook's essays also build on recent bibliographic work of remarkable scope and detail, responding to the growing attention to print culture. With a detailed introduction and 36 newly commissioned chapters by leading and emerging scholars - beginning with Peter Garside's examination of the early nineteenth-century novel and ending with two essays proposing the 'last Victorian novel' - the handbook attends to the major themes in Victorian scholarship while at the same time creating new possibilities for further research. Balancing breadth and depth, the clearly-written, nonjargon -laden essays provide readers with overviews as well as original scholarship, an approach which will serve advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars. As the Victorians get further away from us, our versions of their culture and its novel inevitably change; this Handbook offers fresh explorations of the novel that teach us about this genre, its culture, and, by extension, our own.

Building on recent work on Victorian print culture and the turn toward material historical research in modernist studies, this collection extends the frontiers of scholarship on the "Atlantic scene" of publishing, exploring new ways of grappling with the rapidly changing universe of print at the turn of the twentieth century.

Using the 180-year history of Keats's Eve of St. Agnes as a basis for theorizing about the reading process, Stillinger's book explores the nature and whereabouts of `meaning' in complex works. A proponent of authorial intent, Stillinger argues a theoretical compromise between author and reader, applying a theory of interpretive democracy tha includes the endlessly multifarious reader's response as well as Keats's guessed-at intent. Stillinger also ruminates on the process of constructing meaning, and posits an answer to why Keats's work is considered canonical, and why it is still being read and admired.

One of the most important novelists of the early 19th century, Jane Austen (1775-1817) continues to be read and studied today. Throughout her novels, she creates characters who embody various virtues and limitations. The best characters represent the best behavior, just as the less admirable ones behave in less admirable ways. The courtesy books of the 18th century advise certain moral behavior for character development. This book studies Austen's parallels to 18th century courtesy books. Educational and recreational activities in Austen's novels, such as reading, dancing, card-playing, and theatre-going, are often similar to those activities recommended in the courtesy books with which Austen would have been familiar. So too, various social activities and personal characteristics depicted in Austen's novels frequently accord with courtesy book recommendations.

Proper behavior was of great concern to Austen's contemporaries. Throughout the 18th century, numerous courtesy books were written, advocating certain moral behavior for character development. Austen would have been familiar with these books, for they were influential during the late 18th century, when she grew up, and in the early 19th century, when her works were published.

Although Austen is known as a novelist of manners, surprisingly little work has been done to compare the manners recommended by the courtesy books of the time with the manners of the characters in her novels. This study demonstrates Austen's parallels with 18th century courtesy books in shaping her characters. Educational and recreational activities in her works are often similar to the activities recommended by the courtesy books of her time. So too, the social activities and personal characteristics she presents frequently accord with the recommendations of the courtesy books. Austen's reliance on courtesy books is of great importance, for scholars have generally held that her novels are reflective of the manners of the period. Without the documentation that this study provides, such assertions would remain empty of authority.

This acclaimed biography of Margaret Fuller, first published nearly five decades ago, is now available in a new, expanded edition. Based on Fuller's detailed journals and other writings, it records the life and experiences of a literary critic, radical educator, and outspoken feminist who was deeply involved in the political, spiritual, and cultural ferment that characterized mid-nineteenth century America. It also provides a comprehensive update on recent scholarship and documentary materials that have come to light since the biography's original publication. Madeleine Stern examines Fuller's Massachusetts background, her friendship and literary collaboration with Ralph Waldo Emerson, her feminist writings, and her role as an educator of women. Universal in her interests, Fuller also concerned herself with the new "sciences" of phrenology and animal magnetisim, the advancement of the arts in Boston, the last stand of the Indians of the West, and the ill-fated Italian Republic. She became more widely known as the literary critic on Greeley's New York Tribune and later as America's first woman foreign correspondent. Stern includes a detailed chronology of Fuller's life and a review of Fuller scholarship, including biographies, editions of Fuller's works, and documentary sources. Drawn entirely from facts and impressions recorded by Margaret Fuller herself, this work provides a uniquely lifelike portrait, as well as the carefully researched resource for women's social history and the social, spiritual, and intellectual history of nineteenth-century America.

Looking at the novels of James's major phase in the context of "fin-de-siecle" decadence, "Decadence in the Late Novels of HenryJames" illuminates central issues in the James corpus and central aspects of a rich and fraught cultural moment. Through a close examination of the textures of the novels, Anna Kventsel defines and explores their psycho-cultural field of meaning.

The close of a century invites both retrospection and prognostication. As a period of transition, it also brings a sense of uncertainty, finality, and apocalypticism. These feelings stem from various events, such as political turmoil, scientific advancements, and social change. As might be expected, literature reflects such changes and the feelings they engender. But perhaps more surprisingly, children's literature is especially sensitive to such matters, and fiction for children often struggles with dark and unpleasant issues. This book examines fin de siecle tensions in 19th- and 20th-century children's literature from around the world. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor, and the volume ranges over a disparate variety of topics. These include poetry, series books, pacifist fiction, gender issues, religion and literature, eco-criticism, minority experiences, humor and the Holocaust, fantasy and science fiction, and computer culture. In exploring these issues in relation to children's literature, the contributors reveal the shifting nature of our values and the world in which we live. Global in nature, the chapters look at children's literature from such places as Germany, Holland, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States.

Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) exerted a remarkably wide-ranging influence on the medical, political, and social life of the emerging American nation. He fulfilled the multiple roles of first American professor of chemistry, signer of the Declaration of Independence, foremost American physician, father of American psychiatry, pioneer abolitionist, educator, advocate of temperance, and proponent of prison reform. The success of these endeavors rested largely on the strength and size of his literary output, which was unparalleled by any of the other founding fathers. This bibliographic guide is the only work to identify all of Rush's published writings as well as hundreds of writings about him.

The Introduction surveys Rush's published writings on a variety of topics and places them in their late 18th and early 19th century context. Part one provides a comprehensive chronological listing of Rush's published works, including articles, pamphlets, and books in all their editions. Part one also includes comments from Rush scholars on the nature and significance of many of the works, along with references to contemporary reviews. Extensive cross-references show the relationship between documents. Aids to locating the documents in their original, reprinted, and microtext forms are also provided. Part two lists over 500 publications about Rush and his role in American history. The work includes a title and general index to part one and an author and general index to part two.

Honig's short, pleasantly written book is a consideration of the images of women--as mothers, spinsters, girls, and supernatural women--in 19th-and early 20th-century fantasy novels for children. . . . Honig sees fantasy as a means of freeing women from the Victorian social restraints--at first, imaginatively. "Choice"

This is the first book-length study of nineteenth-century children's fantasy from a feminist viewpoint. Honig focuses on a number of major works that are representative of the best of their era--including such classics as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Caroll; "The Golden Key," "The Princess and the Goblin," and others by George MacDonald; the works of Mary Louisa Molesworth; "Peter and Wendy" by James Barrie; "The Five Children and It"and "The Enchanted Castle" by Edith Nesbit. Through a close reading of these fantasies Honig demonstrates that although Victorian women were still being repressed in the home and the marketplace, the female figure in literature played a role that was quite different from the traditional stereotype of the meek, submissive wife and mother.

Through a careful examination of the work of the canonical nineteenth-century novelists, Mike Davis traces conspiracies and conspiratorial fantasy from one narrative site to another.

This collection of twelve critical essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth-century and Enlightenment is the first to range widely over individual poets and to undertake a comprehensive exploration of their work. Experiment with genre and form, the poetics of the body, the politics of gender, revolutionary critique, and patronage are themes of the collection, which includes discussion of the distinctive projects of Mary Leapor, Ann Yearslep, Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld and Lucy Aikin.

In Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts distinguished critics from Canada, Japan, the US, and the UK, offer fresh and challenging readings of Hardy's works. They also raise far wider and far-reaching questions about Hardy's attitude to his art, his relation to such contemporary forms as melodrama, and his response to the ongoing scientific debates, from Darwin to Einstein, about sexuality; personal identity; the meaning of suicide; and the nature of time.

This new volume in the Author Chronology series offers an intense articulation of Henry James's biographical experiences, which are presented amid the detailed unfolding of his imaginative writing, and set in the larger context of historical developments that impinged upon his life. Evoking the wide range of his experiences with other human beings, his manifold studies of fellow artists in various fields, and his critical articulation of the art of writing fiction, this study reveals his major influence upon subsequent writers and students of fiction. MARKET 1: Nineteenth/Twentieth-Century Literature courses; Gothic Literature; American Writing MARKET 2: Henry James enthusiasts/societies

Although much has been written about the history of copyright and authorship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, very little attention has been given to the impact of the development of other kinds of intellectual property on the ways in which writers viewed their work in this period. This book is the first to suggest that the fierce debates over patent law and the discussion of invention and inventors in popular texts during the nineteenth century informed the parallel debate over the professional status of authors. The book examines the shared rhetoric surrounding the creation of the 'inventor' and the 'author' in the debate of the 1830s, and the challenge of the emerging technologies of mass production to traditional ideas of art and industry is addressed in a chapter on authorship at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Subsequent chapters show how novelists Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot participated in debates over the value and ownership of labour in the 1850s, such as patent reform and the controversy over married women's property. The book shows the ways in which these were reflected in their novels. It also suggests that the publication of those novels, and the celebrity of their authors, had a substantial effect on the subsequent direction of these debates. The final chapter shows that Thomas Hardy's later fiction reflects an important shift in thinking about creativity and ownership towards the end of the century. Patent Inventions argues that Victorian writers used the novel not just to reflect, but also to challenge received notions of intellectual ownership and responsibility. It ends by suggesting that detailed study of the debate over intellectual property in the nineteenth century leads to a better understanding of the complex negotiations over the bounds of selfhood and social responsibility in the period.

British writers of the Romantic Period were popular in Germany throughout the nineteenth century, and translations of Scott, Burns, Moore, Hemans, and Byron (among others) became widespread. This study analyses the reception of William Wordsworth's poetry in 19th century Germany in relation to other romantic poets. Research into Anglo-German cultural relations has tended to see Wordsworth as of little or no interest to Germany but new research shows that Wordsworth was clearly of interest to German poets, translators and readers and that there was significantly more knowledge of and respect for Wordsworth's poetry, and interest in his ideas and beliefs, than has previously been recognised. Williams focuses particularly on the work of Friedrich Jacobsen, Ferdinand Freligrath and Marie Gothein, who span the early, middle, and late years of the century respectively and establishes the wider presence of many others translating, anthologising and commenting on Wordsworth poetry and beliefs.

This Reader's Guide analyses the critical history of two of Hardy's major tragic novels, from the time of their publication to the present. Simon Avery traces the changing critical fortunes of the texts and explores the diverse range of interpretations produced by different theoretical approaches.

Taking its title from James's ambivalent catchphrase, this study explores fundamental concerns of his fiction. The book adopts a modern critical approach, yet is written for the reader whose interest in James is not necessarily academic. It examines six key novels and a number of short stories, interrelating them to provide not only an integrated picture of the fiction, but some conception of what animates it, and readings that challenge long-established critical assumptions.

The dome of thought is the first study of phrenology based primarily on the popular - rather than medical - appreciation of this important and controversial pseudoscience. With detailed reference to the reports printed in popular newspapers from the early years of the nineteenth century to the fin de siecle, the book provides an unequalled insight into the Victorian public's understanding of the techniques, assumptions and implications of defining a person's character by way of the bumps on their skull. Highly relevant to the study of the many authors - Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, among them - whose fiction was informed by the imagery of phrenology, The dome of thought will prove an essential resource for anybody with an interest in the popular and literary culture of the nineteenth century, including literary scholars, medical historians and the general reader. -- .

"Marketing the Author" looks at the careers and the writings of a selection of authors writing in the period 1880-1930 (from the fairly unknown Emilia Dilke and Rosamund Watson to literary celebrities like Henry James, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf) who all impersonated identities which they had created for themselves. It argues that as a result of the socio-economic changes at the time authors had to remain in control of their public image in order to survive.

The 'golden age' of children's literature in the late 19th and early 20th century coincided with a boom in the production and trade of commodities. The first book-length study to situate children's literature within the consumer culture of this period, British Children's Literature and Material Culture explores the intersection of children's books, consumerism and the representation of commodities within British children's literature. In tracing the role of objects in key texts from the turn of the century, Jane Suzanne Carroll uncovers the connections between these fictional objects and the real objects that child consumers bought, used, cherished, broke, and threw away. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, this book takes stock of the changing attitudes towards consumer culture - a movement from celebration to suspicion - to demonstrate that children's literature was a key consumer product, one that influenced young people's views of and relationships with other kinds of commodities. Drawing on a wide spectrum of well-known and less familiar texts from Britain, this book examines works from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There and E. Nesbit's Five Children & It to Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses and Mary Louisa Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock. Placing children's fiction alongside historical documents, shop catalogues, lost property records, and advertisements, Carroll provides fresh critical insight into children's relationships with material culture and reveals that even the most fantastic texts had roots in the ordinary, everyday things.

In the midst of political agitation and increased public visibility, late Victorian feminists turned to writing novels as a means of furthering their political cause without alienating readers. Subversive Discourse reevaluates this culturally significant literature that has long been considered sub-literary. An engaging investigation into the specific circumstances surrounding the production of late Victorian feminist novels, Subversive Discourse delves into the politics and ideologies feminist novels addressed and challenged. This study also considers how aesthetic ideologies served to contain and negate progressive literary agendas such as that of the feminists. Kranidis argues that the Realists appropriated feminist literary and social accomplishments and hence challenges the notion that the Realists were pro-feminist. The author outlines the character of late Victorian feminism, reactionary opposition to it, and the narrative and textual strategies devised by feminists to ensure their texts' publication in a conservative literary marketplace.

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Through attention to incidents of betrayal and self-betrayal in his friends, this book traces the development of Conrad's conception of identity through the three phases of his career: the self in isolation, the self in society and the sexualized self. This book shows how the early fiction of Conrad negotiates the opposed dangers of the self-ideal and the surrender to passion, how the middle fiction test the ideal code psychologically and ideologically and how the late fiction probes sexuality and morbid psychology. It challenges the conventional construction of Conrad's career in terms of achievement and decline.