A provocative inquiry into lasting literary fame, the gifted writers who have achieved it, and the gifted writers who have not Great writers of the past whose works we still read and love will be read forever. They will survive the test of time. We remember authors of true genius because their writings are simply the best. Or . . . might there be other reasons that account for an author's literary fate? This original book takes a fresh look at our beliefs about literary fame by examining how it actually comes about. H. J. Jackson wrestles with entrenched notions about recognizing genius and the test of time by comparing the reputations of a dozen writers of the Romantic period-some famous, some forgotten. Why are we still reading Jane Austen but not Mary Brunton, when readers in their own day sometimes couldn't tell their works apart? Why Keats and not Barry Cornwall, who came from the same circle of writers and had the same mentor? Why not that mentor, Leigh Hunt, himself? Jackson offers new and unorthodox accounts of the coming-to-fame of some of Britain's most revered authors and compares their reputations and afterlives with those of their contemporary rivals. What she discovers about trends, champions, institutional power, and writers' conscious efforts to position themselves for posterity casts fresh light on the actual processes that lead to literary fame.

For John Henry Newman, religion is animated by an imaginative 'master vision' which 'supplies the mind with spiritual life and peace'. All his life, Newman reflected on this 'master vision'. His reflections on the moral imagination developed out of his understanding of practical wisdom, as characterized by Aristotle - the wisdom that 'the good man' has in living a good life. For Newman, the vision at the core of religion completes and perfects the intuitions of the conscience. John Henry Newman and the Imagination looks at how Newman's thinking about the moral and visionary imagination developed over the course of his life; it relates that thinking to his portrayals of religious experience, and vision, in his novels and his poetry. It presents fresh insights into the thought of one of the greatest visionaries of the Victorian age.

This is a complete introduction to Modernist writers, ideas and movements that considers the precursors as well as the legacy of Modernist Literature. Literary Modernism can be described as the flourishing of avant-garde literature over a forty year period but it can be difficult to see how the different movements and authors seen to fall within modernist literature are related. This historical overview explains what modernist literature was by taking the reader through the major figures, ideas and movements, focusing particularly on the core years of 1890-1930 but also looking before to Modernism's influences and precursors and beyond to its continuation and legacy. Concentrating on the British isles but referencing a much wider range of authors and texts and written in a clear, accessible style, this is an indispensable introduction to Modernist writers and movements. "Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging - or indeed downright bewildering. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a 12-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the 'literary' novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and tendencies. Volume 2 examines the period from1750-1820, which was a crucial period in the development of the novel in English. Not only was it the time of Smollett, Sterne, Austen, and Scott, but it also saw the establishment and definition of the novel as we know it, as well as the emergence of a number of subgenres, several of which remain to this day. Conventionally however, it has been one of the least studied areas-seen as a falling off from the heyday of Richardson and Fielding, or merely a prelude to the great Victorian novelists. This volume takes full advantage of recent major advances in scholarly bibliography, new critical assessments, and the fresh availability of long-neglected fictional works, to offer a new mapping and appraisal. The opening section, as well as some remarkable later chapters, consider historical conditions underlying the production, circulation, and reception of fiction during these seventy years, a period itself marked by a rapid growth in output and expansion in readership. Other chapters cover the principal forms, movements, and literary themes of the period, with individual contributions on the four major novelists (named above), seen in historical context, as well as others on adjacent fields such as the shorter tale, magazine fiction, children's literature, and drama. The volume also views the novel in the light of other major institutions of modern literary culture, including book reviewing and the reprint trade, all of which played a part in advancing a sense of the novel as a defining feature of the British cultural landscape. A focus on 'global' literature and imported fiction in two concluding chapters in turn reflects a broader concern for transnat onal literary studies in general.

Jewish Feeling brings together affect theory and Jewish Studies to trace Jewish difference in literary works by nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish authors. Dwor argues that midrash, a classical rabbinic interpretive form, is a site of Jewish feeling and that literary works underpinned by midrashic concepts engage affect in a distinctly Jewish way. The book thus emphasises the theological function of literature and also the new opportunities afforded by nineteenth-century literary forms for Jewish women's theological expression. For authors such as Grace Aguilar (1816-1847) and Amy Levy (1861-1889), feeling is a complex and overlapping category that facilitates the transmission of Jewish ways of thinking into English literary forms. Dwor reads them alongside George Eliot, herself deeply engaged with issues of contemporary Jewish identity. This sheds new light on Eliot by positioning her works in a nexus of Jewish forms and concerns. Ultimately, and despite considerable differences in style and outlook, Aguilar and Levy are shown to deploy Jewish feeling in their ethics of futurity, resistance to conversion and closure, and in their foregrounding of a model of reading with feeling.

When the show was first produced in 1960, at a time when transatlantic musical theatre was dominated by American productions, Oliver already stood out for its overt Englishness. But in writing Oliver , librettist and composer Lionel Bart had to reconcile the Englishness of his Dickensian source with the American qualities of the integrated book musical. To do so, he turned to the musical traditions that had defined his upbringing: English music hall, Cockney street singing, and East End Yiddish theatre. This book reconstructs the complicated biography of Bart's play, from its early inception as a pop musical inspired by a marketable image, through its evolution into a sincere Dickensian adaptation that would push English musical theatre to new dramatic heights. The book also addresses Oliver 's phenomenal reception in its homeland, where audiences responded to the musical's Englishness with a nationalistic fervor. The musical, which has more than fulfilled its promise as one of the most popular English musicals of all time, remains one of the country's most significant shows.
Author Marc Napolitano shows how Oliver 's popularity has ultimately exerted a significant influence on two separate cultural trends. Firstly, Bart's adaptation forever impacted the culture text of Dickens's Oliver Twist; to this day, the general perception of the story and the innumerable allusions to the novel in popular media are colored heavily by the sights, scenes, sounds, and songs from the musical, and virtually every major adaptation of from the 1970s on has responded to Bart's work in some way. Secondly, Oliver helped to move the English musical forward by establishing a post-war English musical tradition that would eventually pave the way for the global dominance of the West End musical in the 1980s. As such, Napolitano's book promises to be an important book for students and scholars in musical theatre studies as well as to general readers interested in the megamusical.

Russia in Britain offers the first comprehensive account of the breadth and depth of the British fascination with Russian and Soviet culture, tracing its transformative effect on British intellectual life from the 1880s, the decade which saw the first sustained interest in Russian literature, to 1940, the eve of the Soviet Union's entry into the Second World War. By focusing on the role played by institutions, disciplines and groups, libraries, periodicals, government agencies, concert halls, publishing houses, theatres, and film societies, this collection marks an important departure from standard literary critical narratives, which have tended to highlight the role of a small number of individuals, notably Sergei Diaghilev, Constance Garnett, Theodore Komisarjevsky, Katherine Mansfield, George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf. Drawing on recent research and newly available archives, Russia in Britain shifts attention from individual figures to the networks within which they operated, and uncovers the variety of forces that enabled and structured the British engagement with Russian culture. The resulting narrative maps an intricate pattern of interdisciplinary relations and provides the foundational research for a new understanding of Anglo-Russian/Soviet interaction. In this, it makes a major contribution to the current debates about transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and 'global modernisms' that are reshaping our knowledge of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British culture.

During the height of 19th century imperialism, Rudyard Kipling published his famous poem "The White Man's Burden." While some of his American readers argued that the poem served as justification for imperialist practices, others saw Kipling's satirical talents at work and read it as condemnation. Gretchen Murphy explores this tension embedded in the notion of the white man's burden to create a new historical frame for understanding race and literature in America.

Shadowing the White Man's Burden maintains that literature symptomized and channeled anxiety about the racial components of the U.S. world mission, while also providing a potentially powerful medium for multiethnic authors interested in redrawing global color lines. Through a range of archival materials from literary reviews to diplomatic records to ethnological treatises, Murphy identifies a common theme in the writings of African-, Asian- and Native-American authors who exploited anxiety about race and national identity through narratives about a multiracial U.S. empire. Shadowing the White Man's Burden situates American literature in the context of broader race relations, and provides a compelling analysis of the way in which literature came to define and shape racial attitudes for the next century.

George Eliot's work has been subject to a wide range of critical questioning, but most of her critics relate her substantially to a Victorian context and intellectual framework. This book seeks to demonstrate that more thany any of her Victorian contemporaries she anticipates significant aspects of writing in the twentieth and indeed twenty-first century in regard to both art and philosophy. Although rightly associated with "realism" her concept of the real is philosophically informed and her writing is also highly allusive.

This new book presents a series of linked essays exploring Eliot's credentials as a radical thinker and her engagement with political and ethical issues. Opening with her relationship to the Romantic tradition and Byron in particular, he goes on to discuss her reading of Darwinism, her radical critique of Victorian values and her affiliation with modernists such as Joyce. The final essays discuss her work in relation to Derridean themes and to the philosopher Bernard Williams' concept of moral luck. What emerges is a very different Eliot from the rather conservative figure portrayed in much of the critical literature, who might justly be thought of as the most significant Victorian writer for twenty-first century readers and critics.

"Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles" is a student-guide to Thomas Hardy's most enduring novel. "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" is one of the great classics of the British novel tradition and one of the most beloved works of the nineteenth century. This lively, informed, and insightful guide explores the style, structure, themes, critical reception, and literary influence of Thomas Hardy's celebrated novel and also discusses its film and TV adaptations. This is the ideal guide to reading and studying the novel, offering guidance on literary and historical context, language, style and form, and reading the text. It covers the novel's critical reception and publishing history, adaptations and interpretations and provides a guide to further reading. "Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

This important new book is the first monograph on children's poetry written between 1780 and 1830, when non-religious children's poetry publishing came into its own. Introducing some of the era's most significant children's poets, the book shows how the conventions of children's verse and poetics were established during the Romantic era.

This title provides a comprehensive guide to studying Wordsworth at undergraduate level. William Wordsworth continues to be one of the most popular and widely studied poets from the nineteenth century. This Reader's Guide provides an overview of Wordsworth's career, which began in obscurity, persisted through ridicule, and culminated finally in popular success and acclaim. It introduces readers to the literary, philosophical, and political contexts crucial to understanding Wordsworth's poetry, offering fresh approaches for reading his most important poems in light of recent developments in literary studies while also spotlighting traditional ones. This guide explores the reasons why Wordsworth continues to be the leading figure of British Romantic literature. It is an indispensable guide to studying Wordsworth's poetry, language, contexts and criticism. "Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

Take Note for Exam Success! York Notes offer an exciting approach to English literature. This market leading series fully reflects student needs. They are packed with summaries, commentaries, exam advice, margin and textual features to offer a wider context to the text and encourage a critical analysis. York Notes, The Ultimate Literature Guides.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

The Romantic phenomenon of multiple texts has been shaped by the link between revision and authorial intent. However, what has been overlooked are the profound implications of multiple and contradictory versions of the same text for a materialist approach; using the works of Coleridge as a case study and the afterlife of the French Revolution as the main theme, this monograph lays out the methodology for a more detailed multi-layered analysis. Scrutinising four works of Coleridge (two poems, a newspaper article and a play), where every major variant is read as a separate work with its own distinct socio-historical context, Ve-Yin Tee challenges the notion that any one text is representative of its totality. By re-reading Coleridge in the light of alternative textual materials within that time, he opens a wider scope for meaning and the understanding of Coleridge's oeuvre.

This book introduces students to the Victorian novel and its contexts, teaching strategies for reading and researching nineteenth-century literature. Combining close reading with background information and analysis it considers the Victorian novel as a product of the industrial age by focusing on popular texts including Dickens's Oliver Twist, Gaskell's North and South and Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. The Victorian Novel in Context examines the changing readership resulting from the growth of mass literacy and the effect that this had on the form of the novel. Taking texts from the early, mid and late Victorian period it encourages students to consider how serialization shaped the nineteenth-century novel. It highlights the importance of politics, religion and the evolutionary debate in 'classic' Victorian texts. Addressing key concerns including realist writing, literature and imperialism, urbanization and women's writing, it introduces students to a variety of the most important critical approaches to the novels. Introducing texts, contexts and criticism, this is a lively and up-to-date resource for anyone studying the Victorian novel.

Each volume of the Platinum Vignettes series presents 50 ultra-high-yield case scenarios of frequently tested topics to give you a clear advantage on the vignette-based Step 1 exam. Plus, the case discussions provide a wealth of tips, insights, buzzwords, advice on handling distractors, and guidance on just what the boards will ask and how to answer.

This study examines how the concept of conversion and specifically the legacy of the doctrine of preparation, as articulated in Puritan Reform theology as transplanted to the Massachusetts Bay colony, remained a vital cultural force shaping developments in American literature and philosophy. It begins by discussing the testimonies of conversion collected by the Puritan minister Thomas Shepard, which reveal an active pursuit of belief by prospective church members occurring at the intersection of experience, perception, doctrine, affections, and intellect. This pursuit of belief, codified in the morphology of conversion, and originally undertaken by the Puritans as a way to conceptualize redemption in a fallen state, established the epistemological contours for what Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James would theorize as a conductive imaginary-consciousness imagined as a space organized or that self-organizes around the dynamics and tensions between abstract truth and concrete realities, certainty and uncertainty, and perception and objects perceived. Each writer offers a picture of consciousness as both a receptive and active force responsible for translating the effects of experience and generating original relations with self, community, and God. This study demonstrates that each writer "ministered" to their audiences by articulating a method or habit of mind in order to foster an individual's continual efforts at regeneration, conceived by all the subjects of this study as a matter of converting semantics, that is, a dedicated willingness to seeking out personal and cultural renewal through the continual process of attaching new meaning and value to ordinary contexts.

Writing Remains brings together a wide range of leading archaeologists and literary scholars to explore emerging intersections in archaeological and literary studies. Drawing upon a wide range of literary texts from the nineteenth century to the present, the book offers new approaches to understanding storytelling and narrative in archaeology, and the role of archaeological knowledge in literature and literary criticism. The book's eight chapters explore a wide array of archaeological approaches and methods, including scientific archaeology, identifying intersections with literature and literary studies which are textual, conceptual, spatial, temporal and material. Examining literary authors from Thomas Hardy and Bram Stoker to Sarah Moss and Paul Beatty, scholars from across disciplines are brought into dialogue to consider fictional narrative both as a site of new archaeological knowledge and as a source and object of archaeological investigation.

Dickens, Journalism, Music presents the first full analysis of the articles on music published in the two journals conducted by Charles Dickens, Household Words and its successor, All the Year Round. Robert Bledsoe examines the editorial influence of Dickens on articles written by a range of writers and what it reveals about his own developing attitude to music and its social role in parks, community singing groups, music halls and on the streets. The book also looks at the difference between the two journals and how the greater coverage of classical music and opera in All the Year Round reflects the increasing importance of music to Dickens in his later life.

In the 19th century, personhood was a term of regulation and discipline in which slaves, criminals, and others, could be "made and unmade." Yet it was precisely the fraught, uncontainable nature of personhood that necessitated its constant legislation, wherein its meaning could be both contested and controlled. Examining scientific and literary narratives, Nihad M. Farooq's Undisciplined encourages an alternative consideration of personhood, one that emerges from evolutionary and ethnographic discourse. Moving chronologically from 1830 to 1940, Farooq explores the scientific and cultural entanglements of Atlantic travelers in and beyond the Darwin era, and invites us to attend more closely to the consequences of mobility and contact on disciplines and persons. Bringing together an innovative group of readings-from field journals, diaries, letters, and testimonies to novels, stage plays, and audio recordings-Farooq advocates for a reconsideration of science, personhood, and the priority of race for the field of American studies. Whether expressed as narratives of acculturation, or as acts of resistance against the camera, the pen, or the shackle, these stories of the studied subjects of the Atlantic world add a new chapter to debates about personhood and disciplinarity in this era that actively challenged legal, social, and scientific categorizations.

This edition collects and prints all of Oscar Wilde's short fiction, principally the three collections of tales published in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The first of these was The Happy Prince (1888), a volume which was aimed at the children's market, and which capitalized on the growing popularity of fairy stories in nineteenth-century Britain. This edition then prints Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (1891), Wilde's volume of short tales satirizing the manners and morals of London's elite in the last decades of the nineteenth century-those 'upper ten thousand', as Max Beerbohm later called them. In many ways these stories anticipate both the themes and the devices of Wilde's later and highly successful society comedies, including Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest. This edition also includes Wilde's second volume of fairy stories, A House of Pomegranates (1891); this volume comprised tales written for adults, and contained Decadent and what can be seen as highly sexualized themes. The textual and printing history of each of these volumes is described and explored in detail. The substantial commentary provides a full critical annotation of each story. Wilde also wrote stories which were not collected, most importantly a jeu d'esprit on the identity of the addressee of Shakespeare's Sonnets-'The Portrait of Mr W.H.', a piece which appeared in periodical form in the late 1880s. Wilde expanded his story, turning it into a hybrid of fiction and criticism, and in the process used it as a vehicle to describe his view of the relationship-physical, artistic, and spiritual-between Shakespeare and a (fictitious) boy-actor in his company, the 'Mr W.H.' of the title and of the dedication of the first printing of Shakespeare's Sonnets. This revised and expanded piece, which remained unpublished in Wilde's lifetime, represents his most sustained and eloquent exploration of male-male desire. The edition prints in full for the first time Wilde's manuscript of that story. Like the other works it prints, the edition also contains full critical annotation which documents Wilde's reading on Renaissance philosophy and theatre history. The lengthy introduction describes in detail Wilde's metamorphosis from a jobbing journalist, whose work often appeared anonymously in the penny press of the 1880s, to an accomplished writer of fiction.

Alan Marshall examines the nature of democratic thought and expression in American experimental poetry, from Walt Whitman in the mid-nineteenth century to George Oppen and Frank O'Hara in the mid-late twentieth. The book's origins lie in Alexis de Tocqueville's ambivalent discussion of 'Some Sources of Poetic Inspiration in Democracies' in the second volume of his Democracy in America. It begins with a chapter on Tocqueville and Whitman, followed by a re-evaluation of the flawed republican humanism of Ezra Pound in the light of the thought of Hannah Arendt. The other main poets considered are Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Muriel Rukeyser, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.
American Poetry and Democratic Thought argues against the narrowly ideological interpretation of politics that dominates contemporary literary studies, an attitude that can be traced back to the legacies of Marx and Freud, and conceives of ideology in deterministic terms as unconscious political alignment. To that extent it echoes Tocqueville's concern, in his great work, to underline the differences between his own methods and perspectives and the historical determinism of his contemporaries. The book draws upon a wide range of thinkers, including Madison, Tocqueville, Kant, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Adorno, Riesman, Arendt, Benhabib, and Cavell, as it seeks to expand and develop Tocqueville's circumspect humanist critical trajectory. The chapters are conceived as a series of innovative dialogical constellations, to which the close reading of poetry is central. The aim throughout is to measure the thought of the poets or their poems against the thoughts of those who are more often called thinkers.

Parisian Pauline Guyot (1805-1886), who wrote under the nom de plume Camille Lebrun, published many novels, translations, collections of tales, and articles in French magazines of her day. Yet she has largely been forgotten by contemporary literary critics and readers. Among her works is a hitherto-untranslated 1845 French novel, Amitie et devouement, ou Trois mois a la Louisiane, or Friendship and Devotion, or Three Months in Louisiana, a moralizing, educational travelogue meant for a young adult readership of the time. Lebrun's novel is one of the few perspectives we have by a mid-nineteenth-century French woman writer on the matters of slavery, abolition, race relations, and white supremacy in France's former Louisiana colony. E. Joe Johnson and Robin Anita White have recovered this work, providing a translation, an accessible introduction, extensive endnote annotations, and period illustrations. After a short preface meant to educate young readers about the geography, culture, and history of the southern reaches of the Louisiana Purchase, the novel tells the tale of two teenaged, orphaned Americans, Hortense Melvil and Valentine Arnold. The two young women, who characterize one another as "sisters," have spent the majority of their lives in a Parisian boarding school and return to Louisiana to begin their adult lives. Almost immediately upon arrival in New Orleans, their close friendship faces existential threats: grave illness in the form of yellow fever, the prospect of marriage separating the two, and powerful discrimination in the form of racial prejudice and segregation.