This series gathers together a body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from important essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects.

Looking at the sociohistorical and sociocultural context, this study investigates examples of anorexia nervosa, a highly symbolic form of nonverbal discourse, in a selection of French novels spanning the period 1835-1889. In each of the novels, there is an unmistakable association between literal and figurative hunger, whereby the protagonists become human signs of their private, unconscious protest. They refuse food not because they are not hungry, but because they hunger too much for effectiveness and self-fulfillment in the face of a repressive society. Each protagonist, when confronted with her severely limited options and overwhelming sense of ineffectiveness, discovers self-empowerment through disorderly eating. The starving body functions as a register of emotional anguish, low self-esteem, and powerlessness. Through a kind of "gender-switching," most of the protagonists voluntarily take on, in an attempt to challenge society's restrictive view of femininity, what are commonly considered to be masculine characteristics. This book will be of interest to students and faculty of literature as well as women's and gender studies. Professional therapists dealing with anorexia will find new insight in this informative and unique presentation of the topic.

When readers jot down notes in their books, they reveal something of themselves--what they believe, what amuses or annoys them, what they have read before. But a close examination of marginalia also discloses diverse and fascinating details about the time in which they are written. This book explores reading practices in the Romantic Age through an analysis of some 2,000 books annotated by British readers between 1790 and 1830.
This period experienced a great increase in readership and a boom in publishing. H. J. Jackson shows how readers used their books for work, for socializing, and for leaving messages to posterity. She draws on the annotations of Blake, Coleridge, Keats, and other celebrities as well as those of little known and unknown writers to discover how people were reading and what this can tell us about literature, social history, and the history of the book.

Published to mark the bicentenary of Alfred Tennyson's birth, these essays offer an important revaluation of his achievement and its lasting importance. After several years in which the temper of criticism has been largely political (and often hostile towards Tennyson in particular) a number of influential recent accounts of Victorian poetry have rediscovered the virtues of a closer style of reading and the benefits and pleasures of an approach that, without at all ignoring social and cultural contexts, approaches them through a primary alertness to textual detail and literary history. This volume, including entirely commissioned work by a wide range of critics and scholars from across the profession in both Britain and North America, seeks to bring such forms of attention to bear on the immense variety of Tennyson's career by exploring the complex and multiple connections between Tennyson and other writers - his predecessors, his contemporaries, and his successors. Collectively, the essays describe an intricate network of affiliation and indebtedness, resistance and reconciliation. They provide a unique assessment of Tennyson's origins, work, and imaginative legacy as he enters upon his third century.

This fascinating new book offers a detailed account of the prolific debate about the sensation novel and considers the genre's dialogues with a number of sciences. Well-known and obscure sensation novels are read against this context in order to recover the forgotten history of sensual reading the genre inspired.

This book initiates a new interdisciplinary approach in the literary and philosophical treatment of Carlyle, challenging the long-held notion that his work was solely influenced by German idealism. Tracing Carlyle's intellectual inheritance through Hume, Reid, and Hamilton, Jessop argues that Carlyle was crucially influenced by Scottish philosophy and that this philosophical discourse can in turn be used to inform critical readings of his texts. The book will be of interest to readers of Carlyle, philosophers, and specialists in the literature and intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Peterson has done a great service to students of African-American theater. . . . Peterson's scholarship is impressive; the book's format is inviting . . . an indispensable reference book for academic libraries. "Choice"

This reference volume addresses an often overlooked area in the history of the American theatre, the contributions of early black playwrights and dramatic writers. At a time when they were denied full participation in many aspects of American life, including the mainstream of the theatre itself, black artists were compiling an impressive record of achievement on the American stage. This book, the most comprehensive on the subject, provides a complete look at these achievements by offering biographical information and a catalog of works for approximately 200 writers, including playwrights, librettists, screenwriters, and radio scriptwriters. From the emergence of black playwrights in the time prior to the Civil War, to the early days of film and radio in this century, the efforts of early black writers are fully documented in this work.

The book begins with an author's preface and is followed by an introductory essay that discusses the development of black American playwrights from the antebellum period to World War II. The heart of the book, the biographical directory, is organized alphabetically, with each entry providing highlights of the author's life and career; collected anthologies that include any works; and an annotated chronological list of individual dramatic works, including genre, length, synopses, production history, prizes and awards, and script sources. Three appendixes offer information on other playwrights and their works, additional librettists and descriptions of their shows, and a chronology of dramatic works by genre. A bibliography cites such information sources as reference books and critical studies, dissertations, play anthologies, and newspapers and periodicals frequently consulted, as well as significant libraries and repositories. The book concludes with title and general indexes and an index to early black theatre organizations. This work will be an important reference source for courses in black American drama and theatre history, and a valuable addition to both public and academic libraries.

Quixotic Fictions of the USA 1792-1815 explores the conflicted and conflicting interpretations of Don Quixote available to and deployed by disenchanted writers of America's new republic. It argues that the legacy of Don Quixote provided an ambiguous cultural icon and ironic narrative stance that enabled authors to critique with impunity the ideological fictions shoring up their fractured republic. Close readings of works such as Modern Chivalry, Female Quixotism, and The Algerine Captive reveal that the fiction from this period repeatedly engaged with Cervantes's narrative in order to test competing interpretations of republicanism, to interrogate the new republic's multivalent crises of authority, and to question both the possibility and the desirability of an isolationist USA and an autonomous "American" literature.
Sarah Wood's study is the first book-length publication to examine the role of Don Quixote in early American literature. Exploring the extent to which the literary culture of North America was shaped by a diverse range of influences, it addresses an issue of growing concern to scholars of American history and literature. Quixotic Fictions reaffirms the global reach of Cervantes's influence and explores the complex, contradictory ways in which Don Quixote helped shape American fiction at a formative moment in its development.

"Visualisation in English Popular Fiction" explores the important yet often neglected tradition of illustrated fiction in English. Author Stuart Sillars suggests new analytical approached for the study of illustrated fiction by offering detailed discussions of a range of representative texts.
Sillars provides an in-depth account of the growth of the illustrated text in 19th century England, and discusses also some of the implications of Roland Barthes' ideas of narratology as they may be applied to this compound form. Following studies in the book explore a range of issues raised by texts of various kinds, such as the visual sense in popular fiction without illustrations, the use of visual narrative in comic strips, and the precise nature of the relocation which occurs when a novel is translated to film.
The author brings to the subject extensive experience of lecturing and writing on the relations between visual and verbal texts. The intersection between art and literature is of ever increasing interest, and this insightful and cross-disciplinary text is a valuable contribution to the debate.

The unlikely heroines analyzed in this book are fictional women, who, like their male counterparts of the era, demonstrated an urge to break with tradition, a rejection of conventional values, and a desire for adventure. The six authors who created them--Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Kate Chopin--at one time or another all received critical acclaim. However, their gender has prevented them, and their works, from being viewed as an integral part of the important literature of the time. The six novels discussed by Ann Shapiro have in comon a denail of the nineteenth-century ideal of true Womanhood in favor of greater freedom and equality for women.

The language of contemporary cultural theory shows remarkable similarities to the patterns of thought which characterized the Victorian's views of race. Far from being marked by a separation from the racialized thinking of the past, "Colonial Desire" illustrates how we are operating "in complicity" with historical ways of viewing "the other," both sexually and racially.
"Colonial Desire" is a controversial and bracing study of the history of Englishness and "culture." Robert Young argues that the theories advanced today about post-colonialism and ethnicity are disturbingly close to the colonial discourse of the nineteenth century. "Englishness," Young argues, has been less fixed and stable than uncertain, fissured with difference and a desire for otherness.

This 15 volume boxed set is a reprint of the 1908 collected works, together with the first trade edition of The Picture of Dorian Grey. With a new critical introduction, and including Stuart Mason's Bibliography of Oscar Wilde.

This volume consists of ten essays by scholars from the Soviet Union, the United States and New Zealand on aspects of Russian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. With the exception of Gorky, all the authors considered belong to one or another branch of the Modernist movement. They include Ivan Konevskoi, who died tragically young in 1901, the poets Maksimilian Voloshin, Viacheslav Ivanov and Benedikt Livshits, and the prose writers Fedor Sologub, Andrei Belyi and Evgenii Zamiatin.

This text offers a sustained account of an area that is usually hastily dismissed. Using the resources of contemporary philosophy - notably Deleuze and Lyotard - Lecercle manages to bring out the importance of nonsense. Why are we - and in particular, philosophers and linguists - so fascinated with nonsense? Why do Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear appear in so many otherwise dull and dry academic books? Lecercle attempts to show how the genre of nonsense was constructed and why it has proved so enduring and enlightening for linguistics and philosophy.

This is a concise yet comprehensive treatment of the American short story that includes an historical overview of the topic as well as discussion of notable American authors and individual stories, from Benjamin Franklin s The Speech of Miss Polly Baker in 1747 to The Joy Luck Club . * Includes a selection of writers chosen not only for their contributions of individual stories but for bodies of work that advanced the boundaries of short fiction, including Washington Irving, Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, Jamaica Kincaid, and Tim O Brien * Addresses the ways in which American oral storytelling and other narrative traditions were integral to the formation and flourishing of the short story genre * Written in accessible and engaging prose for students at all levels by a renowned literary scholar to illuminate an important genre that has received short shrift in scholarly literature of the last century * Includes a glossary defining the most common terms used in literary history and in critical discussions of fiction, and a bibliography of works for further study

Based on a rich range of primary sources and manuscripts, "A Rossetti Family Chronology" breaks exciting new ground. Focusing on Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the "Chronolgy" deomstrates the interconnectedness of their friendships and creativity, giving information about literary composition and artistic output, publication and exhibition, reviews, finances, relationships, health and detailing literary and artistic influences. Drawing on many unpublished sources, including family letters and diaries, this new volume in the" Author Chronologies" series will be of value to all students and scholars of the Rossettis.

Winner of the Thomas Hardy Society Book Prize.

Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist offers the first critical appraisal of the work of Marie Duval (Isabelle Emilie de Tessier, 1847-1890), one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth century. It discusses key themes and practices of Duval's vision and production, relative to the wider historic social, cultural and economic environments in which her work was made, distributed and read, identifing Duval as an exemplary radical practitioner. The book interrogates the relationships between the practices and the forms of print, story-telling, drawing and stage performance. It focuses on the creation of new types of cultural work by women and highlights the style of Duval's drawings relative to both the visual conventions of theatre production and the significance of the visualisation of amateurism and vulgarity. Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist establishes Duval as a unique but exemplary figure in a transformational period of the nineteenth century. -- .

This collection examines the intersection of historical recollection, strategies of representation, and reading practices in historical fiction from the eighteenth century to today. In shifting focus to the agency of the reader and taking a long historical view, the collection brings a new perspective to the field of historical representation.

During his lifetime, Benjamin Constant was known as a political theorist, a courageous defender of liberal causes and a notable historian of the religious experience of mankind. Through his journals, autobiographical works and correspondence--documents mostly unknown by his contemporaries--subsequent generations have discoverd in Constant a fascinating and highly complex personality. In recent decades, a number of private archives have become accessible to scholars for the first time, and this has brought to light important documents by and about Constant.
Drawing on these sources, many unpublished, Dennis Wood offers a fresh assessment of the writer and the man. He closely relates the development of Constant's political thought and passionate interest in the history of religion to his work as a novelist and self-analyst. "Benjamin Constant" draws together the considerable findings of modern scholarship, presenting a lively and sympathetic portrait of the most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy' (Sir Isaiah Berlin).

This collection of essays displays a number of different approaches to the most significant early eighteenth-century periodicals. The range is considerable: the critique of ideology and polemical strategy, the political history of the press, the rhetoric of the genre, and the material circumstances of periodical production all find a place. The periodical profoundly shaped the English reading public's ways of perceiving the social and political institutions of their own age.

The manuscript of Hardy's first great novel, "Far From the Madding Crowd," vanished shortly after its first publication. Rediscovered in 1918 and sold into private hands, it was eventually bequeathed to the Beinecke Rare Books Library at Yale University and studied here in depth, for the first time, by Rosemarie Morgan. This lost manuscript sheds remarkable new light not only on this novel but on the whole of Hardy's work.
The manuscript pages, facsimiles of which are reproduced here, reveal Hardy's original composition in the novel and the reluctantly "cancelled words" which were the result of a long struggle with Sir Leslie Stephen, Hardy's editor. The book was originally commisioned as a rural piece, yet Hardy had other ideas, and author and editor battled over the novel's development. Professor Morgan reveals that Hardy's chief concerns--the development of artistic balance, the role and position of women, his critical view of class distinction--are all articulated much more clearly in the first version than in the printed text. She demonstrates that these pages, with words scored through, sentences overwritten and paragraphs revised, show his progressive development as a twentieth-century "modernist" in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. He was 1"father" of the modern novel's valorization of the "low-life" hero and heroine.
"Cancelled Words" reveals a manner in which Hardy worked: his resistance to censorship, his scrupulous attention to detail and precision, and the often concealed processes underlying his authorship. Ultimately, it serves to shape our understanding of the development of the modern novel.

This work examines class and its representation in Victorian literature, focusing on the emergence of the lower middle class and middle class responses to it. The author analyzes portraits of white collar workers, both men and women, who laboured under disparaging misperceptions of their values, abilities, and cultural significance, and shows how these misperceptions were both formulated and resisted. The analysis includes canonical texts like Dickens's "Little Dorrit" and Gissing's "The Odd Women" as well as less well known works by Dinah Mulock Craik, Margaret Oliphant, Amy Levy, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and May Sinclair.

Mary Shelley lived and wrote during an age of religious instability, one that witnessed the spread of atheism, millenarianism, Methodism, Unitarianism, and Evangelicalism, among other belief systems. In this book, Jennifer L. Airey foregrounds Shelley as an important religious thinker of the Romantic period, analyzing her creative engagement with the religious controversies around her and uncovering a belief system that was both influenced by and profoundly different from those of her male Romantic counterparts. Previous assessments of religion in Shelley's work have been limited in scope and, as Airey asserts, have tended to privilege the novels she wrote when she was married to the prominent atheist Percy Shelley and shortly after his death. Such readings imply that Shelley and her works are most interesting for what they can tell us about her husband and second-generation (and predominantly male) Romanticism. Airey's analysis corrects this imbalance by giving equal weight to Shelley's later work, which draws on Evangelical discourses elevating the mother as the theological and moral center of the household. Nuanced and accessible, Religion Around Mary Shelley makes visible the valuable insight that Shelley's works offer into the complexity of religious views prominent in her cultural moment. It will appeal to specialists and nonacademics interested in the Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley circle.