The Critical Heritage series gathers together a large 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. The Critical Heritage series is available as a set of 67 volumes, as mini-sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) or as individual volumes.

This series gathers together a large 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 essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little-published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation.

"The Critical Heritage" gathers together a large 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. "The Critical Heritage" is available as a set of 67 volumes, as mini-sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) or as individual volumes.

Austen After 200 explores our contemporary relationship with Jane Austen in the wake of the bicentenaries of her death and the first publication of her novels. The volume begins by looking at Austen's popular appeal and at how she is consumed today in diverse cultural venues such the digisphere, blogosphere, festivals and book clubs. It then offers new approaches to the novels within various critical contexts, including adaptation studies, fan fiction, intertextuality, and more. Collecting these new essays in one volume enables a unique view of the crossovers and divergences in engagements with Austen in different settings, and will help a comparative approach between the popular and the academic to emerge more fully in Austen studies. The book gathers insights from a range of contributors invested in new reading spaces in order to show the creative ways in which we are all adapting as we continue to read Austen's works.

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.

The New Woman sought vast improvements in Victorian culture that would enlarge educational, professional, and domestic opportunities. Although New Women resist ready classification or appraisal as a monolithic body, they tended to share many of the same beliefs and objectives aimed at improving female conditions. While novels about the iconoclastic New Woman have garnered much interest in recent decades, poetry from the cultural and literary figure has received considerably less attention. Yet the very issues that propelled New Woman fiction are integral to the poetry of the fin de siecle. This book - the first in-depth account on the subject - enriches our knowledge of exceptionally gifted writers, including Mathilde Blind, M. E. Coleridge, Olive Custance, and Edith Nesbit. It focuses on their long-neglected British verse, analyzing its treatment of crucial matters on both the personal and public level to provide the attention the poetry so richly deserves.

The author argues that in order to appreciate the extraordinary application and industry of Wordsworth, one does not need to risk forgetting the extraordinariness of Coleridge's bursts of creativity and, in order to appreciate Coleridge, one does not need to simultaneously react against a 'dull', 'dutiful' Wordsworth. The book is divided into two parts to acknowledge the dichotomy between the methodologies of Wordsworth and Coleridge - one efficient the other inefficient. In the opinion of many, each was the other's most reliable and powerful source of creative inspiration.

Thomas Hardy frequently insisted that his poems were not self-expressive, but dramatic or 'impersonative'. Yet biographical expositions have dulled their impersonality. Brian Green's approach is more exacting and rewarding; taking Hardy at his word, he traces Hardy's 'master theme' throughout the corpus of poems - a governing concern which merges Victorian and perennial ideas throughout the whole of Hardy's writings.

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.

"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.

This volume explores 'the labyrinth of what we call Coleridge' (Virginia Woolf): his poems and prose, their sources, interpretation and reception; his life, troubled marriage and fatherhood, conversation, changing intellectual contexts and legacy. Major entries cover such canonical works as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, 'Kubla Khan', the 'conversation poems' and Biographia Literaria. But a fuller understanding of Coleridge must embrace many lesser-known poems - lyrics, satire, comical squibs. The prose - critical, philosophical, political, religious - ranges from his early radical writings to the more conservative On the Constitution of the Church and State, his influential Shakespeare lectures, and the vast resource of the notebooks. Coleridge read widely throughout his life and engaged extensively with the work of, among many others, Milton, Fielding, Berkeley, Priestley, Kant, Schelling. One of his most important relationships was with William Wordsworth. Another was with Sara Hutchinson. Entries trace Coleridge's changing reputation, from brilliant young activist to the 'Sage of Highgate' to the later apostle of the theories of the imagination and of Practical Criticism. Other topics covered include opium, plagiarism, the French Revolution, Pantisocracy, Unitarianism, and the Salutation and Cat tavern.

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.

Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies draws on energy concepts to revisit some of our favorite books-Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and The War of the Worlds-and the ways these shape our sense of ourselves as ecological beings. Barri J. Gold regards the laws of thermodynamics not solely as a set of physical principles, but also as a cultural and conceptual form that we can use to reimagine our historically vexed relationship to the natural world. Beginning with an examination of the parallel inceptions of energy and ecology in the mid-nineteenth century, this book considers the question of how we may better read and interpret our world, developing a recipe for experimental reading and insisting upon the importance of literary studies in a world driving to ecological catastrophe.

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 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.

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 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.

The last two decades have seen the business of researching and writing about Percy Bysshe Shelley change in positive and significant ways. Shelleyan characteristics which were once deemed negative are now reviewed as critically engaging qualities. The New Shelley - Later Twentieth Century Views is a collection of essays by some leading scholars of romantic literature which situates Shelley for our own age, not only by contextualizing him within our own scene of critical practice, but also by resituating him within his own scene of poetic production.

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.

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).

Winner of the Thomas Hardy Society Book Prize.

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.

The experience of colour underwent a significant change in the second half of the nineteenth century, as new coal tar-based synthetic dyes were devised for the expanding textile industry. These new, artificial colours were often despised in artistic circles who favoured ancient and more authentic forms of polychromy, whether antique, medieval, Renaissance or Japanese. However faded, ancient hues were embraced as rich, chromatic alternatives to the bleakness of industrial modernity, fostering fantasized recreations of an idealized past. The interdisciplinary essays in this collection focus on the complex reception of the colours of the past in the works of major Victorian writers and artists. Drawing on close analyses of artworks and literary texts, the contributors to this volume explore the multiple facets of the chromatic nostalgia of the Victorians, as well as the contrast between ancient colouring practices and the new sciences and techniques of colour.