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.

In Jane Austen and Narrative Authority, Tara Ghoshal Wallace argues that far from embodying ideological and technical serenity, Austen's novels articulate a range of anxieties about authorship and authority. The novels experiment in different ways with possible sources and the ultimate failures of authority, always returning to the compromised figure of the narrator. Wallace suggests that Austen's novelistic output can be read as a theory of interpretation, thematizing problems of narrative authority and readers' resistance.

Derogation of nineteenth-century women novelists was often the immediate response to their works. While modern feminist scholarship has repudiated this view of scribbling women, finding much of value in both substance and style in this body of literature, many critics and academics remain uninformed and continue to present an almost totally male canon as representative of meritorious writing of this period. The present work undertakes an empirical test of stereotypical notions about women's and men's nineteenth-century fiction, utilizing the computer to examine 80,000 words of running text from passages randomly chosen in twenty novels each by women and men. This material is analyzed for occurrences of various aspects of writing style, such as similes, parallel structures, rhetorical devices, and certain adverbs and adjectives, as well as for sentence length and complexity. That these nonimpressionistic findings show no overwhelming gender differences should finally put to rest traditional negative stereotypes about nineteenth-century women writers. The author of an empirical analysis of twentieth-century fiction by men and women, Professor Hiatt uses these previous findings for a comparison of twentieth and nineteenth-century materials. The twentieth-century analysis showed greater linguistic and stylistic disparities between men's and women's writing. A comparison with the nineteenth-century materials indicates that diachronic shifts have occurred much more broadly and drastically in fiction by male authors. Carefully documented and written, this study will be valuable for researchers and students of women's studies, nineteenth-century American literature, linguistics, stylistics, and computer applications in the humanities.

This book explores fictional responses to the changing transport and urban infrastructure of nineteenth-century France, arguing that networks of movement (and an accompanying 'culture of networks') which had become firmly established by the time of the Second Empire constitute a privileged subject for representation, and that naturalist fiction in particular is that representation's privileged form. Contextualizing the study's critical focus by way of a brief historical outline of the development of infrastructural networks in nineteenth-century France and a delineation of the problematical parameters of French naturalism, Duffy examines literary representations of new forms and conceptualisations of movement, principally in works by Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant. Other authors discussed include the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Baudelaire and Claretie. Literary texts are examined alongside a range of related scientific, sociological and medical texts. What emerges strikingly from consideration of these works and the discourses they - often subversively - incorporate, is that movement, central to nineteenth-century industrial society's view of itself, is frequently perceived and presented self-deludingly in the idealised metaphorical terms of smoothly-functioning systems of perpetual motion, and that naturalist fiction, by exploiting to their full potential the same metaphors in its narratives, challenges this 'anti-entropic' vision.

This set of volumes on Henry James is the third in the "Critical Assessments of Writers in English" series, the aim of which is to provide complete collections of previously published, formative critical assessments covering the whole work of individual writers. They should be useful to serious readers of literature, researchers and advanced students. Many of the pieces included were originally published in journals or books which are now out of print or very difficult to obtain. Each set has an authoritative introductory survey, as well as a full bibliography and biographical details. The choice of material in this set attempts both to gauge the changing response to James and also to establish how consistent has been his stature as a writer. It also attempts to reflect his image - as novelist, critic, dramatist, short-story writer, cultural commentator, travel writer and as a personality as equivocal as his texts. The first volume offers a series of memories of James: friends and critics who help to place the personality in context, followed by responses from 14 writers, poets and novelists. The second volume offers in chronological progression a series of contemporary reviews and views of James's work from both America and Britain together with a series of general essays written between 1879 and 1919. The third volume offers a 20th-century overview from 1919 to the 1980s reflecting the range of the response to James both in terms of subject matter and critical variety. The final volume offers a series of 20th-century interpretations of the major works. This collection provides the student of James with a range of writing on James' work from the 19th century to the 1980s. The bibliography offers a selective listing of the major critical texts and bibliographies as well as details of the publication and serialization of James' works.

This timely book traces ideas of pacifism through English literature, particularly poetry. Four wide-ranging chapters, drawing on both religious and secular texts, provide intellectual and historical contexts. There follows a chronological analysis of poetry which rejects war and celebrates peace, from the middle ages to the present day. The book provides inspiration for all readers who seriously believe that conflict and war do not solve problems, and for students it provides a new kind of thematic history of literature.

In these informed and entertaining essays, Juliet McMaster's recurring concern is with the interpenetration of intelligence with emotion among Jane Austen's characters. The author, a leading Jane Austen scholar, begins with an exploration of Austen's burgeoning popularity in our culture, though close studies of lesser-well known works such as 'Love and Friendship' and 'The Watsons', and familiar texts such as 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Emma', moving on to a wide-ranging exploration through all the novels, of the operation of love and the articulation of desire.

Rudyard Kipling has been one of the most loved and the most loathed of English writers. Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life is a study of the forces and influences that shaped his work--including his unusual family background, his role as the laureate of Empire, and the deaths of two of his children--and of his complex relations with a literary world that first embraced and then rejected him, but could never ignore him.

This book compares the Victorian British poet Robert Browning and the twentieth-century Ghanaian poet and novelist Kojo Laing-two writers whose texts frequently foreground multi-scalar transregional cartographies, points of connection and translation, and imaginative kinships between different linguistic and cultural communities. Starting from the numerous and surprising points of connection and resemblance between both authors' texts, this book puts pressure on critical practices that would keep writers like Laing and Browning separate, positing instead the importance of paying attention to the transnational, cross-cultural, and cross-temporal imaginative relationships texts themselves generate. By comparing two writers whose texts represent different points of view on a number of shared and congruent contexts, this book seeks an original way of understanding the relationship between texts and (post-) colonial contexts, texts and other texts. Browning's and Laing's shared tendency to foreground trans- and post-national cartographies of relation and difference, and their similarly translational aesthetics, both demand a probing of the disciplinary separation between 'English Literature' and 'Comparative Literature', as well as 'literature' and 'comparison', and a fresh awareness of the ways in which literature itself makes comparisons and affiliations. It also involves a version of 'world literature' intent on accentuating the relational worlds (linguistic, imaginative, ethical) that texts themselves generate; a criticism sensitive to the ways in which writers from different times and places can still be seen to overlap.

Why did no one read Sonnet 18 for over one hundred years? What traumatic memories did Sonnet 111 conjure up for Charles Dickens? Which Sonnet did Wilfred Owen find particularly offensive on the WW1 battlefront? What kind of love does Sonnet 116 celebrate and why? Filling a surprising gap in Shakespeare studies, this book offers a challenging new reception history of the Sonnets and explores their belated entry into the Shakespeare canon. Jane Kingsley-Smith reveals the fascinating cultural history of individual Sonnets, identifying those which were particularly influential and exploring why they rose to prominence. This is a highly original study which argues that we should redirect our attention away from the story that the Sonnets tell as a sequence, to the fascinating afterlife of individual Shakespeare Sonnets.

Despite the modern obsession with genetics and reproductive technology, very little has been written about Dickens's fascination with heredity, nor the impact that this fascination had on his novels . Dickens and Heredity is an attempt to rectify that omission by describing the hereditary theories that were current in Dickens's time and how these are reflected in his fiction. The book also argues that Dickens jettisoned his earlier belief in the prescriptive and deterministic potential of heredity after Darwin published The Origin of the Species in 1859.

This Palgrave Pivot offers new readings of Maria Edgeworth's representations of slavery. It shows how Edgeworth employed satiric technique and intertextual allusion to represent discourses of slavery and abolition as a litmus test of character - one that she invites readers to use on themselves. Over the course of her career, Edgeworth repeatedly indicted hypocritical and hyperbolic misappropriation of the sentimental rhetoric that dominated the slavery debate. This book offers new readings of canonical Edgeworth texts as well as of largely neglected works, including: Whim for Whim, "The Good Aunt", Belinda, "The Grateful Negro", "The Two Guardians", and Harry and Lucy Continued. It also offers an unprecedented deep-dive into an important Romantic Era woman writer's engagement with discourses of slavery and abolition.

A fresh new approach to Victorian medievalism, showing it to be far from the preserve of the elite. This book offers a challenge to the current study of nineteenth-century British medievalism, re-examining its general perception as an elite and conservative tendency, the imposition of order from above evidenced in the work of Walter Scott, in the Eglinton Tournament, and in endless Victorian depictions of armour-clad knights. Whilst some previous scholars have warned that medievalism should not be reduced to the role of an ideologically conservative discourse which always and everywhere had the role of either obscuring, ignoring, or forgetting the ugly truths of an industrialised modernity by appealing to a green and ordered Merrie England, there has been remarkably little exploration of liberal or radical medievalisms, still less of working-class medievalisms. Essays in this book question a number of orthodoxies. Can it be imagined that in the world of Ivanhoe, the Eglinton Tournament, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, the working class remained largely oblivious to, or at best uninterested in, medievalism? What, if any, was the working-class medievalist counter-blast to conservatism? How did feminism and socialismdeploy the medieval past? The contributions here range beyond the usual canonical cultural sources to investigate the ephemera: the occasional poetry, the forgotten novels, the newspapers, short-lived cultural journals, fugitive Chartist publications. A picture is created of a richly varied and subtle understanding of the medieval past on the part of socialists, radicals, feminists and working-class thinkers of all kinds, a set of dreams of the Middle Agesto counter what many saw as the disorder of the times.

This highly praised biography is the first to explore fully the way in which her painful early life and rejection by her brother Isaac in particular, shaped the insight and art which made her both Victorian England's last great visionary and the first modern. An immensely readable biography of the 19th century writer whose territory comprised nothing less than the entire span of Victorian society. Kathryn Hughes provides a truly nuanced view of Eliot, and is the first to grapple equally with the personal dramas that shaped her personality - particularly her rejection by her brother Isaac - and her social and intellectual context. Hughes shows how these elements together forged the themes of Eliot's work, her insistence that ideological interests be subordinated to the bonds between human beings - a message that has keen resonance in our own time. With wit and sympathy Kathryn Hughes has written a wonderfully vivid account of Eliot's life that is both moving, stimulating and at times laugh-out-loud funny.

After the first phase of industrialization in Britain, the child emerged as both a victim of and a threat to capitalism. This book explores the changing relationship between the child and capitalist society in the works of some of the most important writers of children's and young-adult texts in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

Bernard Shaw was a prolific author of book reviews, novels, plays, criticism, essays, and correspondence. Throughout his voluminous writings, proverbs occur repeatedly. This book is a comprehensive index to proverbs in ShaW's writings. An introductory chapter discusses the importance of proverbs in ShaW's works and analyzes his use of them. The bulk of the volume is a key-word index to the proverbs, along with a list of editions of ShaW's writings that were consulted.

Proverbs in the key-word index are arranged alphabetically according to the most significant word in the text. Each entry cites quotations from ShaW's works in which the proverb appears. Entries also identify the edition of ShaW's works consulted, and provide the page number on which the proverb appears. The entries then cite major proverb and quotation dictionaries which can be consulted for additional information. Appendices overview the frequency with which Shaw used various proverbial expressions and summarize their distribution in his writings.

Augusta Rohrbach broadens our understanding of the American literary tradition by showing how African American literature and culture greatly influenced the development of realism. Rohrbach traces the influences of the slave narratives—such as the use of authenticating details, as well as dialect, and a frank treatment of the human body—in writings by Howells, Wharton, and others, and explores questions about the shifting relationship between literature and culture in the US from 1830-1930. Beginning with the question, “How might slave narratives—heralded as the first indigenous literature by Theodore Parker—have influenced the development of American Literature?” Rohrbach develops connections between an emerging literary marketplace, the rise of the professional writer, and literary realism.

At the dawn of America's continental empire, James Fenimore Cooper in the early 1800s became the new nation's first major novelist, inaugurating a great period in American literature and bequeathing a number of classic texts including the Leather-Stocking Tales. This Companion to Cooper's writings appeals to high school and college students by outlining Cooper's most frequently assigned novels and establishing their historical backgrounds concerning American Indians and the early United States. Two opening chapters review the author's life and accomplishments, and another offers tips for managing Cooper's style and subject matter. Cooper's breakthrough novel The Spy (1821), which features George Washington as a major actor, has a chapter of its own. The second half of the Companion highlights the Leather-Stocking Tales, with one chapter on the overall saga and five chapters devoted to the individual novels in the series: The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers, and The Prairie. Altogether this Companion shares the spirit of adventure that made Cooper a pioneer of American Romantic literature and his writings a perennial source for ideas and images of Native America, the frontier, and the early modern USA.

• The Spy
• The Deerslayer
• The Last of the Mohicans
• The Pathfinder
• The Pioneers
• The Prairie

'...in this study, Goodwyn sets the standard for Wharton criticism.' - Judith E. Funston, American Literature;'Janet Goodwyn sets out, by looking at Wharton's appropriation of different cultures, to nail the 'canard' that she was 'but a pale imitator of Henry James' - Hermione Lee, Times Literary Supplement; The Land of Letters was henceforth to be my country and I gloried in my new citizenship'. So Edith Wharton described her elation upon the publication of her first collection of short stories; her nationality was henceforth writer' and as such she moved with ease between landscapes, between cultures and between genres in the telling of her tales. In this acclaimed study of Wharton's work, the discussion is shaped by her use of specific landscapes and her consistent concern with ideas of place: the American's place in the Western world, the woman's place in her own and in European society, and the author's place in the larger life of a culture. Her landscapes, both actual and metaphorical, give structure and point to the individual texts and to the whole body of her work.

This work explores an aspect of Yeats's writing largely ignored until now: namely, his wide-ranging absorption with Coleridge. Matthew Gibson explores the consistent and densely woven allusions to Coleridge in Yeats's prose and poetry, often in conjunction with other Romantic figures, arguing that the earlier poet provided him with both a model of philosopher--"the sage"--and an interpretation of metaphysical ideas which were to have resounding effect on his later poetry, and upon his writing of A Vision.

Thomas Hardy and the Church traces the development of Hardy's attitude towards Christianity. Through an analysis, firmly rooted in documentary evidence, of his use of the motifs of church architecture, religious ritual, and the characters of clergymen, Jan Jedrzejewski argues that the tension between Hardy's emotional attachment to the Christian tradition and his inability to accept its ontological essence generated a response to Christianity that was complex, often ambiguous, and by no means uniformly critical.

This new collection of essays re-examines the relationship between the aesthetic and the human in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century manifestations of art for art's sake. It treats aestheticism as a subject of perennial interest in the field. Employing a unique methodology in approaching the study of aestheticism from a transnational, comparative standpoint - the volume as a whole presents readers with a variety of perspectives on the topic, in a coherent way.This book: includes contributions from a number of up-and-coming young scholars who are getting a good name (eg, Yvonne Ivory); addresses the question: 'does art for art's sake seek to de-humanize or re-humanize art, the artist or the artistic receptor?' and engages with art, literature, philosophy and literary and aesthetic theory.Art for art's sake addresses the relationship between art and life. Although it has long been argued that aestheticism aims to de-humanize art, this volume seeks to consider the counterclaim that such de-humanization can also lead to re-humanization and to a deepened relationship between the aesthetic sphere and the world at large.

Not In Sisterhood investigates an important transitional moment in the history of U.S. women's writing : the uneasy shift from the 19th-century model of the "lady author" to some new but undefined alternative. The careers of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, together with that of their friend and peer Zona Gale, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, reveal several different strategies for negotiating this unknown terrain. While Gale made her feminist politics an integral part of her successful novels and plays, Wharton and Cather publicly denied any interest in gender issues or social reforms. Not in Sisterhood shows how the complex intersections of literary and social politics that shaped the world of Wharton, Cather, and Gale are still at work in today's feminist reconstructions of literary history.