Through attention to incidents of betrayal and self-betrayal in his friends, this book traces the development of Conrad's conception of identity through the three phases of his career: the self in isolation, the self in society and the sexualized self. This book shows how the early fiction of Conrad negotiates the opposed dangers of the self-ideal and the surrender to passion, how the middle fiction test the ideal code psychologically and ideologically and how the late fiction probes sexuality and morbid psychology. It challenges the conventional construction of Conrad's career in terms of achievement and decline.

The text is that of the 1813 first edition, accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory annotations. This edition also includes: biographical portraits of Austen by members of her family and, new to the fourth edition, those by Jon Spence (Becoming Jane Austen) and Paula Byrne (The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things). Also included are fifteen critical essays, twelve of them new to the fourth edition, reflecting the finest current scholarship. Contributors include Janet Todd, Jim Collins, Andrew Elfenbein, Felicia Bonaparte and Tiffany Potter, amongst others. "Writers on Austen"-a new section of brief comments by Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden and others. A Chronology and revised and expanded Selected Bibliography.

***Winner of the CCUE Book Prize 2012 ***
Fascinated by his own imagination, Coleridge secretly wrote that its characteristic blend of power and desire made him a "Daemon": a being superstitiously feared as "a something transnatural." "Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination" examines this simultaneous experience of exaltation and transgression as a formative principle in Coleridge's poetry and the fabric of his philosophy. In a reading that spans the breadth of Coleridge's achievement, through politics, religion and his relationship with Wordsworth, this book builds to a new interpretation of the poems where Coleridge's daemonic imagination produces its myths: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel." Gregory Leadbetter reveals a Coleridge at once more familiar and more strange, in a study that unfolds into an essay on poetry, spirituality, and the drama of human becoming.

Taking its title from James's ambivalent catchphrase, this study explores fundamental concerns of his fiction. The book adopts a modern critical approach, yet is written for the reader whose interest in James is not necessarily academic. It examines six key novels and a number of short stories, interrelating them to provide not only an integrated picture of the fiction, but some conception of what animates it, and readings that challenge long-established critical assumptions.

This book examines the proliferation of troubled, unstable and unreadable female figures in the English novels written by men between 1870 and 1910. This period saw the birth of literary modernism, the advent of psychoanalysis and the first wave of feminism. The faculty of will and the experience of desire structure a troubled relationship to modernity during this period. The tension between them is located in the feminine subject of popular fiction. Chapters focus on the work of Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, George Gissing, Henry James, E.M. Forster and finally and briefly, James Joyce. These male novelists were far more engaged in the project of imagining a new feminine agency than their counterparts during feminism's second wave. The monograph focuses on the tension in their work between woman as aesthetic object of the novel and woman as troubling subject of a new modern consciousness. Inscrutable and troubling female characters were the ground on which fiction staged its move from the popular into high art.

William Blake and the Daughters of Albion offers a challenge to the Blake establishment. By placing some of Blake's early prophetic works in startlingly new historical contexts (most provocatively those of female conduct and pornography) a very different image of the radical Blake emerges. The book shows what can be achieved when a challenging methodology, feminist historicism, is brought to bear on a canonical writer and on now canonized interpretations of his work.

Series Information:
Routledge Literary Sourcebooks

Deeply involved with Irish culture and history, W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest poets writing in the last two centuries. This Routledge Literary Sourcebook provides essential help for readers who wish to learn more about his powerful, haunting poems.
Considering Yeats's early, dreamily evocative poems as well as his passionate, tension-ridden later work, Michael O'Neill offers a refreshingly clear discussion of:
*contexts - through an invaluable, accessible overview, a detailed chronology and contemporary documents revealing Yeats's understanding of his vocation as a poet;
*interpretations - through helpfully introduced extracts from criticism of Yeats's work, ranging from early responses through to modern critical texts;
*key poems - in a section where insightful commentary accompanies the full annotated text of many of Yeats's major poems;
*further reading - to guide those interested in additional study.
The Sourcebook is ideal for those new to Yeats's poetry or those who wish to look deeper into its workings, its reception and the contexts from which it emerged.

Series Information:
Routedge Literary Sourcebooks

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.

Edward F. Mooney takes us into the lived philosophies of Melville, Kierkegaard, Henry Bugbee, and others who write deeply in ways that bring philosophy and religion into the fabric of daily life, in its simplicities, crises, and moments of communion and joy. Along the way Mooney explores meditations on wilderness, on the enigma of self-deception, the role of maternal love and the pain of separations, and the pervasiveness of "difficult reality" where valuable things are presented to us under two (or more) aspects at once.

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.

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. -- .

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.

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.

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.

The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction explores the representation of Victorian womanhood in the work of some of today's most important British and North American novelists including A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and Toni Morrison. By analysing these novels in the context of the scientific, religious and literary discourses that shaped Victorian ideas about gender, it contributes to an important inter-disciplinary debate. For while showing the power of these discourses to shape women's roles, the novels also suggest how individual women might challenge that power through their own lives.

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.

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.

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.

This study places Kipling's fiction in its original cultural, intellectual and historical contexts, exploring the impact of India, America, South Africa and Edwardian England on his imperialist narratives. Drawing on manuscripts, journalism and unpublished writings, Hagiioannu uncovers the historical significance and hidden meanings of a broad range of Kipling's stories, extending the discussion from the best-known works to a number of less familiar tales. Through a combination of close textual analysis and lively historical coverage, "The Man Who Would Be Kipling suggests that Kipling's political ideas and narrative modes are more subtly connected with lived experience and issues of cultural environment than critics have formerly recognized.

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 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.

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.

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