John Ruskin's training as an interdisciplinary polymath started in childhood. He learned to memorise the Bible at his mother's knee and published his first poem aged ten. His lifelong fascination with geology found its earliest expression in journal articles from the age of fifteen, while his considerable talents as a draughtsman were developed by leading drawing masters before he was sixteen. Rather than being a prodigy in one particular field, it was his precocious mix of religion, science and art that laid the foundations for the fulfilment of his career as a critic of art, architecture and society. The cultural tours that he made with his family as he grew up provided the crucial focus for these developing interests, and the second extended tour of the Continent in 1835 at the age of sixteen in particular established the paradigm for his orchestrated representation and analysis of cultural experience along 'the old road', through France to Chamonix, and through the Swiss Alps to northern Italy as far as Venice. His diary of the journey and associated writings, together with the numerous drawings he made in relation to it, are annotated and fully catalogued for the first time in this edition that includes maps and an introductory essay. Keith Hanley is Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University. Caroline S. Hull is a freelance academic writer and researcher.

Bringing together the human story of care with its representation in film, fiction and memoir, this book combines an analysis of care narratives to inform and inspire ideas about this major role in life. Alongside analysis of narratives drawn from literature and film, the author sensitively interweaves the story of his wife's illness and care to illuminate perspectives on dealing with human decline. Examining texts from a diverse range of authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton and Alice Munro, and filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman and Michael Haneke, it addresses questions such as why caregiving is a dangerous activity, the ethical problems of writing about caregiving, the challenges of reading about caregiving, and why caregiving is so important. It serves as a fire starter on the subject of how we can gain insight into the challenges and opportunities of caregiving through the creative arts.

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!

While the end of the nineteenth century is often associated with the rise of objectivity and its ideal of a restrained observer, scientific experiments continued to create emotional, even theatrical, relationships between scientist and his subject. On Flinching focuses on moments in which scientific observers flinched from sudden noises, winced at the sight of an animal's pain or cringed when he was caught looking, as ways to consider a distinctive motif of passionate and gestured looking in the laboratory and beyond. It was not their laboratory machines who these scientific observers most closely resembled, but the self-consciously emotional theatrical audiences of the period. Tiffany Watt-Smith offers close readings of four experiments performed by the naturalist Charles Darwin, the physiologist David Ferrier, the neurologist Henry Head, and the psychologist Arthur Hurst. Bringing together flinching scientific observers with actors and spectators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century theatre, it places the history of scientific looking in its wider cultural context, arguing that even at the dawn of objectivity the techniques and problems of the stage continued to haunt scientific life. In turn, it suggests that by exploring the ways recoiling, shrinking and wincing becoming paradigmatic spectatorial gestures in this period, we can understand the ways Victorians thought about looking as itself an emotional and gestured performance.

In this book, Heather McAlpine argues that emblematic strategies play a more central role in Pre-Raphaelite poetics than has been acknowledged, and that reading Pre-Raphaelite works with an awareness of these strategies permits a new understanding of the movement's engagements with ontology, religion, representation, and politics. The emblem is a discursive practice that promises to stabilize language in the face of doubt, making it especially interesting as a site of conflicting responses to Victorian crises of representation. Through analyses of works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A.C. Swinburne, and William Morris, Emblematic Strategies examines the Pre-Raphaelite movement's common goal of conveying "truth" while highlighting differences in its adherents' approaches to that task.

The Victorian classical burlesque was a popular theatrical genre of the mid-19th century. It parodied ancient tragedies with music, melodrama, pastiche, merciless satire and gender reversal. Immensely popular in its day, the genre was also intensely metatheatrical and carries significance for reception studies, the role and perception of women in Victorian society and the culture of artistic censorship. This anthology contains the annotated text of four major classical burlesques: Antigone Travestie (1845) by Edward L. Blanchard, Medea; or, the Best of Mothers with a Brute of a Husband (1856) by Robert Brough, Alcestis; the Original Strong-Minded Woman (1850) and Electra in a New Electric Light (1859) by Francis Talfourd. The cultural and textual annotations highlight the changes made to the scripts from the manuscripts sent to the Lord Chamberlain's office and, by explaining the topical allusions and satire, elucidate elements of the burlesques' popular cultural milieu. An in-depth critical introduction discusses the historical contexts of the plays' premieres and unveils the cultural processes behind the reception of the myths and original tragedies. As the burlesques combined spectacular effects with allusions to contemporary affairs, ambivalent and provocative attitudes to women, the plays represent an essential tool for reading the social history of the era.

The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe offers a full historical survey of Dickens's reception in all the major European countries and many of the smaller ones, filling a major gap in Dickens scholarship, which has by and large neglected Dickens's fortunes in Europe, and his impact on major European authors and movements. Essays by leading international critics and translators give full attention to cultural changes and fashions, such as the decline of Dickens's fortunes at the end of the nineteenth century in the period of Naturalism and Aestheticism, and the subsequent upswing in the period of Modernism, in part as a consequence of the rise of film in the era of Chaplin and Eisenstein. It will also offer accounts of Dickens's reception in periods of political upheaval and revolution such as during the communist era in Eastern Europe or under fascism in Germany and Italy in particular.

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.

Italian Women Writers, 1800-2000: Boundaries, Borders, and Transgression investigates narrative, autobiography, and poetry by Italian women writers from the nineteenth century to today, focusing on topics of spatial and cultural boundaries, border identities, and expressions of excluded identities. This book discusses works by known and less-known writers as well as by some new writers: Sibilla Aleramo, La Marchesa Colombi, Giuliana Morandini, Elsa Morante, Neera, Matilde Serao, Ribka Sibhatu, Patrizia Valduga, Annie Vivanti, Laila Waida, among others; writers who in their works have manifested transgression to confinement and entrapment, either social, cultural, or professional; or who have given significance to national and transnational borders, or have employed particular narrative strategies to give voice to what often exceeds expression. Through its contributions, the volume demonstrates how Italian women writers have negotiated material as well as social and cultural boundaries, and how their literary imagination has created dimensions of boundary-crossing.

The Barret Browning volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers a comprehensive selection of the works of one of the nineteenth-century's most famous poets. The revaluation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's work by feminist scholars has made her an established (indeed standard) author in university syllabuses in Britain and in America. Yet the emphasis upon her contribution to a female tradition has tended to rigidify Barrett Browning's contribution to English literary culture in the nineteenth century, just as her popular image as ringleted-invalid-turned-romantic-heroine served sentimentally to eclipse her role as a literary pioneer. This edition complements or corrects these emphases by being the first edition dedicated to witnessing the progress and growth of the poet's creative direction - from her juvenilia through to her major achievements and beyond. In keeping with the aims of the series, the selection honours the original sequencing of the published works as the best means of indicating the contours of Barrett Browning's poetic career. Thus, following fairly limited selections from published juvenilia, The Battle of Marathon (1820) and 'An Essay on Mind' and Other Poems (1826) and from 'Prometheus Bound' and Miscellaneous Poems (1833), there are more extensive selections from 'The Seraphim' and Other Poems (1838), from Poems 1844 and from Poems 1850 including the full text of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Substantial excerpts from Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is followed by the full text of Aurora Leigh (1857) and by selections from the posthumous Last Poems (1862). These individual sections are supplemented by careful selections (also chronologically ordered) from the correspondence, including the courtship letters with Robert Browning, and, where applicable, from poetry unpublished in the nineteenth century. The edition comes with full scholarly apparatus (introduction, chronology, explanatory notes), though it follows the series policy of recording only significant variants between editions.

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.

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.

This new title outlines the lives and works of three popular and influential women poets of the nineteenth century: Felicia Hemans, Dora Greenwell and Adelaide Anne Procter. All three sought to forge a Christian and emotive poetics in order to educate and sensitise their readership, offering a gentle and benevolent reading experience grounded in interpersonal feeling and religious love. This study investigates both the radical potential and possible limits of such a project, one inflected by the poets' relationships to feeling and religion, whether dissenting, Anglican, Methodist, Evangelical or Roman Catholic. The study also seeks to situate the poets in their historical and aesthetic moment, examining their diverse interest in figures such as Schiller, Coleridge, Germaine de Stael and Dickens. Underlying all three poets' work, however, is the profound influence of Wordsworth, figured by them as a literary as well as spiritual guide anchoring their explorations of religion, feeling and poetry.

Michel Foucault continues to be regarded as one of the most essential thinkers of the twentieth century. A brilliantly evocative writer and conceptual creator, his influence is clearly discernible today across nearly every discipline-philosophy and history, certainly, as well as literary and critical theory, religious and social studies, and the arts. This volume exploits Foucault's insistent blurring of the self-imposed limits formed by the disciplines, with each author in this volume discovering in Foucault's work a model useful for challenging not only these divisions but developing a more fundamental interrogation of modernism. Foucault himself saw the calling into question of modernism to be the permanent task of his life's work, thereby opening a path for rethinking the social. Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism shows, on the one hand, that literature and the arts play a fundamental structural role in Foucault's works, while, on the other hand, it shifts to the foreground what it presumes to be motivating Foucault: the interrogation of the problem of modernism. To that end, even his most explicitly historical or strictly epistemological and methodological enquiries directly engage the problem of modernism through the works of writers and artists from de Sade, Mallarme, Baudelaire to Artaud, Manet, Borges, Roussel, and Bataille. This volume, therefore, adopts a transdisciplinary approach, as a way to establish connections between Foucault's thought and the aesthetic problems that emerge out of those specific literary and artistic works, methods, and styles designated "modern." The aim of this volume is to provide a resource for students and scholars not only in the fields of literature and philosophy, but as well those interested in the intersections of art and intellectual history, religious studies, and critical theory.

For most of the twentieth century the exuberantfluency of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's art was not regarded as worthy ofserious attention. Even the evidence for the swiftness of her wit, thought andcomposition remains more impressionistic and anecdotal than firmly proven.Through close attention to original manuscript material, Josie Billingtonargues that Barrett Browning's fast, fine and excitedly vigorous and agileimaginative intelligence is Shakespearean, both in its power, and in thecreative drive and dynamic to which it gives rise. Billington contends that for Barrett Browning, asfor Shakespeare, writing was demonstrably a creative event not a second-orderrecord of experience, and that Barrett Browning's characteristic habits ofcomposition, and her creative procedure, resemble in significant ways those ofthe poet she valued most highly. A fascinating study of both writers' analogouscreative dispositions, minds and modes.>

British Literature and Classical Music explores literary representations of classical music in early 20th century British writing. Covering authors ranging from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells and D.H. Lawrence, the book examines literature produced during a period of widely proliferating philosophical, educational, and performance-oriented musical activities in both public and private settings. David Deutsch demonstrates how this proliferation caused classical music to become an increasingly vital element of British culture and a vehicle for exploring contentious issues such as social mobility, sexual freedoms, and international political rivalries. Through the use of archives of concert programs, cult novels, and letters written during the First and Second World Wars, the book examines how authors both celebrated and satirized the musicality of the lower-middle and working classes, same-sex desiring individuals, and cosmopolitan promoters of a shared European culture to depict these groups as valuable members of and - less frequently as threats to - British life.

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.

The collection Imperial Middlebrow, edited by Christoph Ehland and Jana Gohrisch, takes middlebrow studies further in two ways. First, it focuses on the role middlebrow writing played in the popularisation and dissemination of imperial ideology. It combines the interest in the wider function of literature for a colonial society with close scrutiny of the ideological and socio-economic contexts of writers and readers. The essays cover the Girl's Own Paper, fiction about colonial India including its appearance in Scottish writing, the West Indies, the South Pacific, as well as illustrations of Haggard's South African imperial romances. Second, the volume proposes using the concept of the middlebrow as an analytical tool to read recent Black and Asian British as well as Nigerian fiction.

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.