What happened to beauty? How did the university literature classroom turn into a seminar on politics? Focusing on such writers as Don DeLillo, Virginia Woolf, and James Merrill, this book examines what has been lost to literature as a discipline, and to literary criticism as a practice, as a result of efforts to reduce the aesthetic to the ideological. Green-Lewis and Soltan celebrate the return of beauty as a subject in its own right to literary studies, a return all the more urgent given beauty's ability to provide not merely consolation but a sense of order and control in the context of a threatening political world.

Since Hedda Gabler exploded on to European and American stages in the 1890s, the play and its title character have troubled and transfixed audiences, performers and critics the world over. In this Routledge Literary Sourcebook, Christopher Innes balances essential reprinted texts with clear, incisive commentary to:
*set the play within the contexts of Norwegian nationalism, the women's movement and the cultural movement of Naturalism
*examine and emphasize the links between - the performance and criticism of the play, from 1890 to the present
*offer the ideal guide to key passages in the play, showing how a knowledge of the play's contexts, performance history and critical fortunes can give rise to exciting new readings of the text
*prepare readers for further study of the play, with suggestions for reading on specific issues of interest.
No student should be without this guide as they enter the fascinating world of Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen and Naturalist theater.

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.

Why are there so few 'happily ever afters' in the Romantic-period verse romance? Why do so many poets utilise the romance and its parts to such devastating effect? Why is gender so often the first victim? The Romantic Paradox investigates the prevalence of death in the poetic romances of the Della Cruscans, Coleridge, Keats, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Byron, and posits that understanding the romance and its violent tendencies is vital to understanding Romanticism itself.

This collection brings together scholars from disciplines including Children's Literature, Classics, and History to develop fresh approaches to children's culture and the uses of the past. It charts the significance of historical episodes and characters during the long nineteenth-century (1750-1914), a critical period in children's culture. Boys and girls across social classes often experienced different pasts simultaneously, for purposes of amusement and instruction. The book highlights an active and shifting market in history for children, and reveals how children were actively involved in consuming and repackaging the past: from playing with historically themed toys and games to performing in plays and pageants. Each chapter reconstructs encounters across different media, uncovering the cultural work done by particular pasts and exposing the key role of playfulness in the British historical imagination. -- .

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Every generation of readers has interpreted the meaning of The Red Badge of Courage anew. Its appeal is both historical and universal--historical in its Civil War setting and universal in its relating of the experiences of a young man who is thrust into a situation he does not understand and cannot cope with. This collection of historical documents, collateral readings, and commentary will promote interdisciplinary study of the novel and enrich the reader's understanding of its themes and historical context. A wide variety of more than 40 primary documents and firsthand accounts brings to life the Civil War experiences of leaders and soldiers of the Union and Confederacy, especially in the Battle of Chancellorsville, which is the setting for the novel. Carefully selected memoirs, poems, short stories, newspaper articles, and interviews illuminate the historical setting, the themes of cowardice and desertion, battlefield experiences, the soldier's life in camp, and the issue of pacifism as it relates to The Red Badge of Courage as an antiwar novel. Many of these documents appear in print here for the first time. The documents include: memoirs of Civil War generals at Chancellorsville who were in marked disagreement with one another, remembrances of cavalry and foot soldiers, poems by those who experienced the war, short stories by Civil War veterans, a series of newspaper articles on World War II veterans who experienced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, "The War Prayer" by Mark Twain and "The Wound Dresser" by Walt Whitman, poems and a short story by Stephen Crane, and an interview with a conscientious objector in World War II. Each section of this casebook contains study questions, topics for research papers and class discussions, and lists of further reading. A selection of photos and a map complete the work. This is an ideal companion for teacher use and student research in interdisciplinary, English, and American history courses.

This book offers a one-volume study of Jane Austen that is both a sophisticated critical introduction and a valuable contribution to the study of one of the most popular and enduring British novelists. Darryl Jones provides students with a coherent overview of Austen's work and an idea of the current state of critical debate.

Thomas Carlyle was a major figure in Victorian literature and a unique commentator on nineteenth-century life. Born in humble circumstances in the Scottish village of Ecclefechan in 1795, his rise to fame was marked by fierce determination and the development of a highly distinctive literary voice. In this clear, authoritative and readable biography, John Morrow traces Carlyle's personal and intellectual career. Wide-ranging, prophetic and invariably challenging, his work ranged from the astonishing pseudo-autobiography Sartor Resartus to major historical works on the French Revolution and Frederick the Great, and to radical political manifestos such as Latter Day Pamphlets. Thomas Carlyle is an account of his work and of his life, including celebrity as the Sage of Chelsea and his tempestuous marriage to Jane Welsh Carlyle.

This innovative study investigates the emergence and impact of the lower middle class on British print culture through the figure of the office clerk. Using a variety of source materials - including novels, magazines, newspapers, letters, and life writing - the author traces the literary profile of the white collar worker during a time of unprecedented change in class and culture. This interdisciplinary work offers important insights into a previously - and undeservedly - neglected area of social and book history, and explores key works by George Gissing, Trollope, Thackeray, Dickens and Forster.

Dickens was known for his incredible imagination and fiery social protest. This book shows how Dickens used the fairy tale to express his political and social views, and helped establish it as an important literary genre for the Victorian Public. Drawing on exciting new criticism by Jack Zipes, Maria Tartar and others, and covering all of Dickens's works, Social Dreaming sheds valuable socio-historical light on the fairy tale as a social tool. This book also includes a lengthy examination of Dickens's periodicals - the most popular middle-class publications in Victorian times - a largely neglected area of Dickens's criticism. The work will be of interest to Dickens scholars, students of Victorian Literature, and children's literature specialists.

This book argues that brother-sister relationships--idealized by the Romantics and intensified in 19th-century English domestic culture--is a neglected key to understanding Victorian gender relations. Attracted by the apparent purity of the sibling bond, novelists and poets also acknowledged its innate ambivalence and instability, through conflicting patterns of sublimated devotion, revenge fantasy, and corrosive obsession. The final chapter shows how the brother-sister bond was permanently changed by the experience of the First World War.

"Through an examination of his later personal notebooks, this study explores the reciprocal effects that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's scientific explorations, philosophical convictions, theological beliefs, and states of health exerted upon his perceptions of human Body/Soul relations, both in life and after death"--Provided by publisher.

The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess explores the influence upper-class, socially engaged women had on literary and political culture in the U.S. and in England in the years 1870-1920. Annie Fields, an American, was first married to James T. Fields, a prominent Boston publisher; after his death she became companion to Sarah Orne Jewett, one of the foremost New England writers. Mary Gladstone was a daughter of William Gladstone, one of Great Britain's most famous Prime Ministers. Both became well known as hostesses, entertaining the leading figures of their day; both also kept journals and wrote letters in which they recorded those figures' conversations. Susan K. Harris reads these records to exhibit the impact such women had on the cultural life of their times and to show how the skills acquired as hostesses in the 19th century facilitated their entry into the public arena in the 20th. The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess shows how Fields and Gladstone negotiated alliances, won over key figures to their parties' designs, and fought to develop major cultural institutions ranging from the Organization of Boston Charities to London's Royal College of Music.

Taking a fresh approach to the study of the gothic in Victorian fiction, the development of the cinema, and Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," " Gothic Returns" explores the contained or repressed desires of both characters and plots that defy direct representation, resulting in obsession, fetishism, and displacement engendering a novel account of the way in which the gothic becomes internalized.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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!

This volume prints more than 150 letters, most of them previously unpublished, which appeared too late for inclusion in the second edition of The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1967-88): they are indispensable for understanding the poet and the inner dynamics of the Wordsworth circle. Of outstanding interest are the unexpectedly tender and fervent letters which Wordsworth wrote to his wife Mary during brief periods of separation in 1810 and 1812: others provide fresh evidence about his contacts with Annette Vallon and his `French' daughter Caroline long after his withdrawal from revolutionary politics in France, and indeed up to the end of his life. Further letters illustrate the poet's literary and personal relations with Coleridge, Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Charles Lamb; his changing political and social views; his life in the Lake District and London; and, above all, his lifelong commitment to poetry and the principles that guided his imaginative life. These letters, varied in tone and subject-matter, will do much to dispel the ideal that he was invariably a reluctant or reserved correspondent. Dorothy Wordsworth, by contrast, fills out all the details of domestic life which her brother thought it unnecessary to dwell on, and her letters add their own characteristic touches to the picture of the Wordsworth circle - until the final breakdown of her health.

In this revisionary study of the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth and their friends during the 'revolutionary decade' David Fairer questions the accepted literary history of the period and the critical vocabulary we use to discuss it. The book examines why, at a time of radical upheaval when continuities of all kinds (personal, political, social, and cultural) were being challenged, this group of poets explored themes of inheritance, retrospect, revisiting, and recovery. Organising Poetry charts their struggles to find meaning not through vision and symbol but from connection and dialogue. By placing these poets in the context of an eighteenth-century 'organic' tradition, Fairer moves the emphasis away from the language of idealist 'Romantic' theory towards an empirical stress on how identities are developed and sustained through time. Locke's concept of personal identity as a continued organisation 'partaking of one common life' offered not only a model for a reformed British constitution but a way of thinking about the self, art and friendship, which these poets found valuable. The key term, therefore, is not 'unity' but 'integrity'. In this context of a need to sustain and organise diversity and give it meaning, the book offers original readings of some well known poems of the 1790s, including Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' and 'The Ruined Cottage', and Coleridge's conversation poems 'The Eolian Harp', 'This Lime-Tree Bower', and 'Frost at Midnight'. Organising Poetry represents an important contribution to current critical debates about the nature of poetic creativity during this period and the need to recognise its more communal and collaborative aspects.

This book documents how Oscar Wilde was appropriated as a fictional character by no less than thirty-two of his contemporaries. Focusing on Wilde's relationships with many of these writers, Kingston examines and critiques 'Wildean' portraits by such celebrated authors as Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw and Bram Stoker, as well as some lesser-known writers. Many fascinating, little-known biographical and literary connections are revealed. While this work will be of significant interest to scholars of Wilde, it is also written in a clear, accessible style which will appeal to the non-academic reader with a general interest in Wilde or the late Victorian period.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is perhaps the best-known and most widely studied literary representation of science. Yet it is by no means the only text of its time to fictionalize the latest experiments and discoveries of natural philosophers. Science was burgeoning in the years 1760-1840, revolutionising how people saw the world around them, and this extended to the literary world.
This five volume set is divided into sections by scientific discipline, each illuminating a context of current interest to literary scholars. An extensive introduction is included in the first volume giving a brief history of the development of various scientific fields - including Geology, Palaeontology, Chemistry and Physics - resumes of the central texts/discoveries and their significance, and an account of their impact on literature - and sometimes, literature's impact on science. A bibliography of major scientific works and suggestions for critical reading is also provided and the set is completed with a detailed index.
The set is divided as follows:
Volume 1:
Science and Politics; Medicine; Mesmerism; Electricity/Electro-Chemistry/Galvanism and Magnetism
Volume 2:
Chemistry; Heat and Light
Volume 3:
Astronomy; Mensuration/Instruments; Women in Science; Science and Social Change; Institutionalization; Philosophy of Science and Engineering and Technology
Volume 4:
Manufactures; Botany; Natural History and Meteorology; Exploration and the Races of Humankind: Craniology, Physiognomy, Phrenology
Volume 5:
Theories of Life; Comparative Anatomy and Geology/Palaeontology

The modern-day suburb began, and began booming, in 19th-century Britain. As suburbia spread, the New Woman arose and fin-de-siecle concerns grew, suburban men felt more besieged. Anxieties about hygiene, pollution, purity, the home, class, gender roles, patrilineal power and the state of the Empire rippled through British fiction. The new man of the house was trying, often desperately, to hold onto the old order, changing even more rapidly as the 20th century and modernist fiction arrived. This study traces suburban masculinities in popular genres-speculative fiction, comic fiction and detective fiction--and in literary works from the late-Victorian era to the start of the First World War.

Erotic Coleridge charts Coleridge's prolific creation of love poems from early flirtatious verse to poems about marital incompatibility, the blank faces of young women fearing for their reputations, the obliterating seductions of young women, the exaltation of falling in love, the spoken and sung voices of women, the pain of jealousy, and late meditations on how to live with the waning of love. In his prose, he responds to Parliamentary debates about punishing adulteresses and gives advice about how marriage can warp the soul. In his sensual exuberance and his ethics of reverencing the individuality of other persons, Coleridge attends closely to the lives of women.

The Critical Heritage series collects together criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a particular writer, showing students the formation of critical attitudes to the writer's work and its place within a literary tradition. Selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentary material, such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included to demonstrate posthumous fluctuations in the writer's reputation.
This new volume includes criticism the work of William Wordsworth between 1793 and 1820. Over 250 diary extracts, letters, reviews, comments, and opinions by and about Wordsworth are gathered together here for the first time. This is an invaluable addition to any literary library.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203169026