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.

Claudia Brodsky marshals her equal expertise in literature and philosophy to redefine the terms and trajectory of the theory and interpretation of modern poetry. Taking her cue from Wordsworth's revolutionary understanding of "real language," Brodsky unfolds a provocative new theory of poetry, a way of looking at poetry that challenges traditional assumptions. Analyzing both theory and practice, and taking in a broad swathe of writers and thinkers from Wordsworth to Rousseau to Hegel to Proust, Brodsky is at pains to draw out the transformative, active, and effective power of literature. Poetry, she says, is only worthy of the name when it is not the property of the poet but of society, when it is valued for what it does. Words' Worth is a bold new work, by a leading scholar of literature, which demands a response from all students and scholars of modern poetry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.>

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.

Travel narratives and historical works shaped the perception of Muslims and the East in the Victorian and post-Victorian periods. Analyzing the discourses on Muslims which originated in the European Middle Ages, the first part of the book discusses the troubled legacy of the encounters between the East and the West and locates the nineteenth-century texts concerning the Saracens and their lands in the liminal space between history and fiction. Drawing on the nineteenth-century models, the second part of the book looks at fictional and non-fictional works of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century which re-established the "Oriental obsession," stimulating dread and resentment, and even more strongly setting the Civilized West against the Barbaric East. Here medieval metaphorical enemies of Mankind - the World, the Flesh and the Devil - reappear in different contexts: the world of immigration, of white women desiring Muslim men, and the present-day "freedom fighters."

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.

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.

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.

Scholars and critics commonly align W. B. Yeats with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and the modernist movement at large. This incisive study from renowned poetry critic Edna Longley argues that Yeats' presence and influence in modern poetry have been sorely misunderstood. Longley disputes the value of modernist critical paradigms and suggests alternative perspectives for interpreting Yeats - perspectives based on his own criticism, and on how Ireland shaped both his criticism and his poetry. Close readings of particular poems focus on structure, demonstrating how radically Yeats' approach to poetic form differs from that of Pound and Eliot. Longley discusses other twentieth-century poets in relation to Yeats' insistence on tradition, and offers valuable insights into the work of Edward Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Wilfred Owen, Hugh MacDiarmid, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Geoffrey Hill, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Her postscript addresses key issues in contemporary poetry by taking a fresh look at Yeats's enduring legacy.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

"Savage Songs & Wild Romances "considers the various types of poetry - from short songs and laments to lengthy ethnographic epics - which nineteenth-century settlers wrote about indigenous peoples as they moved into new territories in North America, South Africa, and Australasia. Drawing on a variety of texts (some virtually unknown), the author demonstrates the range and depth of this verse, suggesting that it exhibited far more interest in, and sympathy for, indigenous peoples than has generally been acknowledged. In so doing, he challenges both the traditional view of this poetry as derivative and eccentric, and more recent postcolonial condemnations of it as racist and imperialist. Instead, he offers a new, more positive reading of this verse, whose openness towards the presence of the indigenous Other he sees as an early expression of the tolerance and cultural relativity characteristic of modern Western society. Writers treated include George Copway, Alfred Domett, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George McCrae, Thomas Pringle, George Rusden, Lydia Sigourney, and Alfred Street.

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.