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."

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.

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.

For more than 25 years, York Notes have been helping students throughout the UK to get the inside track on the written word. Firmly established as the nation's favourite and most comprehensive range of literature study guides, each and every York Note has been carefully researched and written by experts to make sure that you get the most wide-ranging critical analysis, the most detailed commentary and the most helpful key points and checklists. York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. Written by established literature experts, they introduce students to a more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

For more than 25 years, York Notes have been helping students throughout the UK to get the inside track on the written word. Firmly established as the nation's favourite and most comprehensive range of literature study guides, each and every York Note has been carefully researched and written by experts to make sure that you get the most wide-ranging critical analysis, the most detailed commentary and the most helpful key points and checklists. York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. Written by established literature experts, they introduce students to a more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

Daniel R. Schwarz has studied and taught the modern British and Irish novel for decades and now brings his impressive erudition and critical acuity to bear in this insightful study of the major authors and novels from 1890--1930.

After a compelling introduction outlining his method and a substantial first chapter establishing the intellectual, cultural, and literary contexts in which the modern British and Irish novel was produced, Schwarz turns to powerful and sensitive close reading of modernist masterworks. He shows how Hardy's "Jude the Obscure," Conrad's "Heart of Darkness "and "Lord Jim," Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers" and "The Rainbow," Joyce's "Dubliners" and "Ulysses," Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse,""" and Forster's "A Passage to India" form essential components in a modernist cultural tradition which includes the visual arts.

In his characteristic lucid and readable style, Schwarz's work takes account of recent developments in theory and cultural studies. His persuasive study will not only be invaluable to students and teachers, but will also be of interest to the general reader.

Wessex did not spring full-born from Hardy's imagination when he began to write. The first part of the book reveals in detail how Wessex became what it is, geographically, socially and culturally, beginning with his first poem in the 1860s and ending with Winter Words, his last collection of verse. The second (briefer) part is an account of the impact of Hardy's vision of Wessex on twentieth-century English culture, offering an explanation for Hardy's endurance as a popular novelist.

This book offers a new and challenging look at the cultural significance of the Battle of Waterloo, and the impact it had on British Romantic culture. Drawing on a range of approaches it aims to redefine the Romantic period as an age of inter- and intra-national conflict, thus overturning conventional notions of 'The Romantic Project', and re-writing the period from first principles. Topics covered include: the impact of Waterloo on Romantic ideas of individual and national identity, the representation of the dead and wounded in poetry, painting and prose, the work of canonical and non-canonical poets.

An emblematic figure of the 'bourgeois century', the parvenu represents the Other on which a society depends. This drama of exclusion is symptomatic of nineteenth-century society: ambivalent about social mobility, oscillating between a new sense of opportunity for all and a backward-looking retrenchment to rigid social structures.

In this volume, thirteen essays examine the full breadth and variety of Coleridge's afterlives. Topics include philosophy, gender, imagination, American literature, South Asian literature, aesthetics, narrative, and poetry. It offers new research to the scholar, maps complex territory, and spans traditional period barriers in literary studies.

Dangerous Enthusiasm considers Blake's prophetic books written during the 1790s in the light of the French Revolution controversy raging at the time; his works are shown to be less the expressions of isolated genius than the products of a complex response to the cultural politics of his contemporaries. William Blake's work presents a stern challenge to historical criticism. Jon Mee's new study meets the challenge by investigating contexts outside the domains of standard literary histories. He traces the distinctive rhetoric of the illuminated books to the French Revolution controversy of the 1790s and Blake's fusion of the diverse currents of radicalism abroad in that decade. The study is supported by a wealth of original research which will be of interest to historians and literary critics alike. Blake emerges from these pages as a 'bricoleur' who fused the language of London's popular dissenting culture with the more sceptical radicalism of the Enlightenment. Dangerous Enthusiasm presents a more comprehensively politicized picture of Blake than any previous study.

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This six volume boxed set comprises of individual volumes on: Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold (Volumes 1 and 2), William Morris and Walter Pater. The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes. Publication: October 1995.

Oscar Wilde was a consumer modernist. His modernist aesthetics drove him into the heart of the mass culture industries of 1890s London, particularly the journalism and popular theatre industries.

Wilde was extremely active in these industries: as a journalist at the Pall Mall Gazette; as magazine editor of the Womena (TM)s World; as commentator on dress and design through both of these; and finally as a fabulously popular playwright.

Because of his desire to impact a mass audience, the primary elements of Wildea (TM)s consumer aesthetic were superficial ornament and ephemeral public image a " both of which he linked to the theatrical. This concern with the surface and with the ephemeral was, ironically, a foundational element of what became twentieth-century modernism a " thus we can call Wildea (TM)s aesthetic a consumer modernism, a root and branch of modernism that was largely erased.

Dorothy Wordsworth has a unique place in literary studies. Notoriously self-effacing, she assiduously eschewed publication, yet in her lifetime, her journals inspired William to write some of his best-known poems. Memorably depicting daily life in a particular environment (most famously, Grasmere), these journals have proven especially useful for readers wanting a more intimate glimpse of arguably the most important poet of the Romantic period.

With the rise of women's studies in the 1980s, however, came a shift in critical perspective. Scholars such as Margaret Homans and Susan Levin revaluated Dorothy's work on its own terms, as well as in relation to other female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part of a larger shift in the academy, feminist-oriented analyses of Dorothy's writings take their place alongside other critical approaches emerging in the 1980s and into the next decade.

One such approach, ecocriticism, closely parallels Dorothy's changing critical fortunes in the mid-to-late 1980s. Curiously, however, the major ecocritical investigations of the Romantic period all but ignore Dorothy's work while at the same time emphasizing the relationship between ecocriticism and feminism. The present study situates Dorothy in an ongoing ecocritical dialogue through an analysis of her prose and poetry in relation to the environments that inspired it.

This book examines continuities and changes in narrative strategies deployed to deal with female desire in a broad range of fiction from the late sixteenth-century to the early nineteenth-century. By focussing on 'designing women' and the lengths to which they can and should go as agents of their desires, this book investigates the way generic and moral or social issues intersect in the depiction of female subjectivity. The book examines narrative strategies deployed in the representation of female desire in a broad range of fiction from the late sixteenth-century to the early-nineteenth century, discussing key texts such as Jane Eyre, Pamela, Pride and Prejudice and Arcadia

Comprises of separate volumes on the following: John Clare, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Algernon Swinburne. The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.

Includes individual volumes on William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2 volume set), Robert Southey, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.

This set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes.

Literature, Money and the Market: From Trollope to Amis, argues that literary institutions have been saturated with hostility to commerce and the market that goes back to Plato. It traces the division in English culture between the prestige values of the aristocracy and the material values of the commercial class. The book is a fresh look at both the representation of money in English literature, and the economic situation of writers.

Incorporating the most recent discoveries concerning Blake's heritage and cultural context, Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake: The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism proposes a radical new reading of his early works, that sees them taking enlightenment ideas to heights never dreamed of by Locke and Priestley. Drawing on a careful analysis of key figures from both sides of the enlightenment/counter-enlightenment divide (including Boehme, Swedenborg, the Moravians, Lavater, Brothers, Erasmus Darwin), the discussion traces an alternative tradition that disrupts previous assumptions about important aspects of Blake's thought.

Mina Loy-poet, artist, exile, and luminary-was a prominent and admired figure in the art and literary circles of Paris, Florence, and New York in the early years of the twentieth century. But over time, she gradually receded from public consciousness and her poetry went out of print. As part of the movement to introduce the work of this cryptic poet to modern audiences, Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy provides new and detailed explications of Loy's most redolent poems. This book helps readers gain a better understanding of the body of Loy's work as a whole by offering compelling close readings that uncover the source materials that inspired Loy's poetry, including modern artwork, Baedeker travel guides, and even long-forgotten cultural venues. Helpfully keyed to the contents of Loy's Lost Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger Conover, this book is an essential aid for new readers and scholars alike. Mina Loy forged a legacy worthy of serious consideration-through a practice best understood as salvage work, of reclaiming what has been so long obscured. Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy dives deep to bring hidden treasures to the surface.

The horse was essential to the workings of Victorian society, and its representations, which are vast, ranging, and often contradictory, comprise a vibrant cult of the horse. Examining the representational, emblematic, and rhetorical uses of horses in a diversity of nineteenth-century texts, Gina M. Dorre shows how discourses about horses reveal and negotiate anxieties related to industrialism and technology, constructions of gender and sexuality, ruptures in the social fabric caused by class conflict and mobility, and changes occasioned by national "progress" and imperial expansion. She argues that as a cultural object, the horse functions as a repository of desire and despair in a society rocked by astonishing social, economic, and technological shifts. While representations of horses abound in Victorian fiction, Gina M. Dorre's study focuses on those novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Braddon, Anna Sewell, and George Moore that engage with the most impassioned controversies concerning horses and horse-care, such as the introduction of the steam engine, popular new methods of horse-taming, debates over the tight-reining of horses, and the moral furor surrounding gambling at the race track. Her book establishes the centrality of the horse as a Victorian cultural icon and explores how through it, dominant ideologies of gender and class are created, promoted, and disrupted.