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.

This title discusses the religious dimension to Dickens' representation of London, focusing on how the picture he paints of the city interacts with other modes of imagery. It develops past scholarship on Dickens and London, re-evaluating their accounts of the religious dimensions to the city's symbolic function in Dickens' works. It includes discussion of key works (Bleak House, Dombey and Son and Oliver Twist). It features Dickens studies of perennial interest to students and scholars, and the city' and modernity both of increasing interest within Literature. It includes a colour plate section.Dickens' London often acts as a complex symbol, composed of numerous sub-symbols, such as crowd, river, railway networks and police systems. This book is particularly interested in how Dickens' treatment of the city allows him to re-examine traditional Christian discourses on the issues of revelation, renunciation and regeneration.

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.

This book is a critical biography of Grant Allen, (1848-1899), the first for a century, based on all the surviving primary sources. Born in Kingston, Ontario, into a cultured and affluent family, Allen was educated in France and England. A mysterious marriage while he was an Oxford undergraduate wrecked his academic career and radicalized his views on sexual and marital questions, as did a three-year teaching stint in Jamaica. Despite his lifelong ill health and short life, Allen was a writer of extraordinary productivity and range. About half - more than 30 books and many hundreds of articles - reflects interests which ran from Darwinian biology to cultural travel guides. His prosperity, however, was underpinned by fiction; more than 30 novels, including The Woman Who Did , which has attracted much recent attention from feminist critics and historians. The Better End of Grub Street uses Allen's career to examine the role and status of the freelance author/journalist in the late-Victorian period. Allen's career delineates what it took to succeed in this notoriously tough profession.

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.

"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.