The Brontes are perhaps the world's most famous literary family, with Charlotte, Emily and Anne the authors of some of the best-loved books in the English language, including 'Jane Eyre', 'Wuthering Heights' and 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall'. The Bronte sisters lived in a time when the class system was very rigid and their education, when many people could not even read, was unusual. This title examines their lives."

Charles Dickens is credited with creating some of the world's best-known fictional characters, and is widely regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age. Even before reading the works of Dickens many people have met him already in some form or another. His characters have such vitality that they have leapt from his pages to enjoy flourishing lives of their own: The Artful Dodger, Miss Havisham, Scrooge, Fagin, Mr Micawber, and many many more. His portrait has been in our pockets, on our ten-pound notes; he is a national icon, indeed himself a generator of what Englishness signifies. In this Very Short Introduction Jenny Hartley explores the key themes running through Dickens's corpus of works, and considers how they reflect his attitudes towards the harsh realities of nineteenth century society and its institutions, such as the workhouses and prisons. Running alonside this is Dickens's relish of the carnivalesque; if there is a prison in almost every novel, there is also a theatre. She considers Dickens's multiple lives and careers: as magazine editor for two thirds of his working life, as travel writer and journalist, and his work on behalf of social causes including ragged schools and fallen women. She also shows how his public readings enthralled the readers he wanted to reach but also helped to kill him. Finally, Hartley considers what we mean when we use the term 'Dickensian' today, and how Dickens's enduring legacy marks him out as as a novelist different in kind from others. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. * This book was previously published in hardback as Charles Dickens: An Introduction

Unjustly deported to Devil's Island following Louis-Napoleon's coup-d'etat in December 1851, Florent Quenu escapes and returns to Paris. He finds the city changed beyond recognition. The old Marche des Innocents has been knocked down as part of Haussmann's grand program of urban reconstruction, replaced by Les Halles, the spectacular new food markets. Disgusted by a bourgeois society whose devotion to food is inseparable from its devotion to the Government, Florent attempts an insurrection. Les Halles, apocalyptic and destructive, play an active role in Zola's picture of a world in which food and the injustice of society are inextricably linked.
This is the first English translation in fifty years of Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris). The third in Zola's great cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, it is as enthralling as Germinal, Therese Raquin, and the other novels in the series. Its focus on the great Paris food hall, Les Halles--combined with Zola's famous impressionist descriptions of food--make this a particularly memorable novel. Brian Nelson's lively translation captures the spirit of Zola's world and his Introduction illuminates the use of food in the novel to represent social class, social attitudes, political conflicts, and other aspect of the culture of the time. The bibliography and notes ensure that this is the most critically up-to-date edition of the novel in print.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more."

As in many literatures of the New World grappling with issues of slavery and freedom, stories of racial insurrection frequently coincided with stories of cross-racial romance in nineteenth-century U.S. print culture. Colleen O'Brien explores how authors such as Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Livermore, and Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda imagined the expansion of race and gender-based rights as a hemispheric affair, drawing together the United States with Africa, Cuba, and other parts of the Caribbean. Placing less familiar women writers in conversation with their more famous contemporaries--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Lydia Maria Child--O'Brien traces the transnational progress of freedom through the antebellum cultural fascination with cross-racial relationships and insurrections. Her book mines a variety of sources--fiction, political rhetoric, popular journalism, race science, and biblical treatises--to reveal a common concern: a future in which romance and rebellion engender radical social and political transformation.

This text contains essays on writers from the 1840s to the 1890s, and includes well-known writers such as Anne Bronte, Wilkie Collins, and Bram Stoker, as well as lesser known writers such as Geraldine Jewsbury, Charles Reade, Margaret Oliphant, George Moore, Sarah Grand and Mary Ward. The contributors explore important thematic concerns such as the relationship between private and public realms, gender and social class, sexuality and the marketplace, and male and female cultural identity.

Essays in Romanticism, a peer-reviewed journal edited by Alan Vardy, is the official journal of the International Conference on Romanticism, succeeding Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism. Available to purchase as a single issue, EiR continues the tradition of its predecessor in encouraging contributions within an interdisciplinary and comparative framework. More broadly, it welcomes submissions on any aspect of Romanticism, and especially work using emergent or innovative perspectives and approaches.

Makes available research from international experts
This "Encyclopedia" gathers, for the first time, information not easily found elsewhere without extensive research. The material has been distilled from a variety of sources by over 200-internationally recognized contributors-including such leading Whitman scholars as James E. Miller, Jr., Roger Asselineau, Betsy Erkkila, and Joel Myerson. Writing under the guidance of a distinguished 11-member advisory board, they provide unprecedented access to important information about Whitman.
Comprehensive A-to-Z coverage of more than 750 topics
In all, the volume comprises more than 750 signed entries arranged in convenient alphabetical format. Coverage includes:
*Biographical Information-all names, dates, places, and events important to understanding Whitman's life and career.
*Whitman's Works-essays on all eight editions of "Leaves of Grass," major poems and poem clusters, principal essays and prose works, as well as his more than two dozen short stories and the novel, "Franklin Evans."
*Prominent Themes and Concepts-essays on such major topics as democracy, slavery, the Civil War, immortality, sexuality, and the women's rights movement.
*Significant Forms and Techniques-such as prosody, symbolism, free verse, and humor.
*Important Trends and Critical Approaches in Whitman Studies-including New Historicist and cultural criticism, psychological explorations, and controversial issues of sexual identity.
*Surveys of Whitman's International Impact-as well as an assessment of his literary legacy.
A user-friendly guide
Useful for students, researchers, librarians, teachers, and Whitmandevotees, this volume features extensive cross-references, numerous photographs of the poet, a chronology, a special appendix section tracking the poet's genealogy, and a thorough index. Each entry includes a bibliography for further study.

English Stage Comedy 1490-1990 is a unique and beautifully written study of the comedy of the English stage from the Tudor period to the late twentieth century. Alexander Leggatt demonstrates that an examination of comedy as a 'genre' can tell us much about the relationships between literature and society. English Stage Comedy 1490-1990 surveys five centuries of classic comic drama, focusing on major playwrights such as:
* Shakespeare
* Jonson
* Etherege
* Wycherley
* Congreve
* Vanbrugh
* Goldsmith
* Sheridan
* Wilde
* Shaw
* Coward
* Orton
* Ayckbourn

Provides essays on the careers, works and backgrounds of the 150 poets and over 1000 poems that are included in the Library of America anthology (1-57958-034-3). It also provides entries on specialized categories of 19th-century verse, such as hymns, folk ballads, spirituals, Civil War songs and Native American poetry. The entries, besides presenting essential factual information, amount to in-depth critical essays. A bibliography at the end of each entry directs readers to other key works by and about the poet. The encyclopaedia is keyed to the contents of the Library of America anthology.

First published in 1972, this volume contains contemporary British periodical reviews of Shelley, Keats and London Radical Writers, including William Godwin, Leigh Hunt and Mary Shelley, in publications from the Analytical Review to the General Weekly Register. Introductions to each periodical provide brief sketches of each publication as well as names, dates and bibliographical information. Headnotes offer bibliographical data of the reviews and suggested approaches to studying them. This book will be of interest to those studying the Romantics and English literature.

A young, inexperienced governess is charged with the care of Miles and Flora, two small children abandoned by their uncle at his grand country house. She sees the figure of an unknown man on the tower and his face at the window. It is Peter Quint, the master's dissolute valet, and he has come for little Miles. But Peter Quint is dead. Like the other tales collected here - `Sir Edmund Orme', `Owen Wingrave', and `The Friends of the Friends' - `The Turn of the Screw' is to all immediate appearances a ghost story. But are the appearances what they seem? Is what appears to the governess a ghost or a hallucination? Who else sees what she sees? The reader may wonder whether the children are victims of corruption from beyond the grave, or victims of the governess's `infernal imagination', which torments but also entrals her? `The Turn of the Screw' is probably the most famous, certainly the most eerily equivocal, of all ghostly tales. Is it a subtle, self-conscious exploration of the haunted house of Victorian culture, filled with echoes of sexual and social unease? Or is it simply, `the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read'? The texts are those of the New York Edition, with a new Introduction and Notes. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

First published in 1995. The essays in this volume demonstrate how Victorian women took up various positions along a continuum that ranged from the desire of Shelley's creature for the power and acceptance it associated with the house to the rejection of Bronte's heroine of the immobility and powerlessness she ultimately experienced there. More specifically the essays in this volume explore the nature of the Victorian woman's domestic relations by centring in one activity that most informed her place in what was often the father's house: housekeeping. The essays in this edition determine how writers, especially novelists, both male and female, used housekeeping to construct, reconstruct, represent, and inscribe the female self and condition. This title will be of interest to students of history and literature.

Wry political fairy tales from a nineteenth-century politician that speak to our current times Edouard Laboulaye (1811-1883), one of nineteenth-century France's most prominent politicians and an instrumental figure in establishing the Statue of Liberty, was also a prolific writer of fairy tales. Smack-Bam, or The Art of Governing Men brings together sixteen of Laboulaye's most artful stories in new translations. Filled with biting social commentary and strong notions of social justice, these rediscovered tales continue to impart lessons today. Inspired by folktales from such places as Estonia, Germany, Iceland, and Italy, Laboulaye's deceptively entertaining stories explore the relationships between society and the ruling class. In "Briam the Fool," the hero refuses the queen's hand after he kills the king. In "Zerbino the Bumpkin," the king and prime minister are idiots, while the king's daughter runs away with a woodcutter to an enchanted island. And in the title story, "Smack-Bam, or The Art of Governing Men," a superficial prince is schooled by a middle-class woman who smacks him when he won't engage in his lessons and follows him across Europe until he falls in love with her. In these worlds, shallow aristocrats come to value liberty, women are as assertive and intelligent as men, and protagonists experience compassion as they learn of human suffering. With an introduction by leading fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes that places Laboulaye's writing in historical context, Smack-Bam, or The Art of Governing Men presents spirited tales from the past that speak to contemporary life.

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers a comprehensive selection of the work of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, this authoritative edition enables students to study Barrett Browning's work within the rich context of her life and writing career. The revaluation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's work by feminist scholars has made her an established author in university syllabuses in Britain and in America. Yet the reception of Barrett Browning as a writer within an explicitly female tradition has tended to limit the appreciation of her wider contribution to English literary culture in the nineteenth century, just as her popular image as a ringleted romantic heroine served sentimentally to eclipse her role as a literary pioneer. This edition complements or corrects these emphases by being the first edition dedicated to witnessing the progress and growth of the poet's creative direction-from her juvenilia through to her major achievements and beyond. The selection of works presented here appear in the order in which they were originally published, enabling students and readers to experience the contours of Barrett Browning's poetic career. Thus, following selections from published juvenilia, The Battle of Marathon (1820) and 'An Essay on Mind' and Other Poems (1826) and from 'Prometheus Bound' and Miscellaneous Poems (1833), there are more extensive selections from 'The Seraphim' and Other Poems (1838), from Poems 1844 and from Poems 1850 including the full text of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Substantial excerpts from Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is followed by the full text of Aurora Leigh (1857) and by selections from the posthumous Last Poems (1862). These individual sections are supplemented by careful selections (also chronologically ordered) from the correspondence, including the courtship letters with Robert Browning, and, where applicable, from poetry unpublished in the nineteenth century. Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Barrett Browning, and a Chronology.

Describing everything from bread and cappuccinos to mass-market furnishings, a language of the "artisanal" saturates our culture today. That language, Peter Betjemann proposes, has a rich and specifiable history. Between 1840 and 1920, the cultural appetite for handmade chairs, tables, cabinets, and other material odds and ends flowed through narrative and texts as much as through dusty workshops or the physical surfaces of clay, wood, or metal. Judged by classic axioms about labor's virtue--axioms originating with Plato and foundational to modern theories of workmanship--the vigorous life of craft as represented in these texts might seem a secondhand version of an ideal and purposeful activity. But "Talking Shop "celebrates these texts as a cultural phenomenon of their own. In the first book to consider the literary representation of craft rather than of labor in general, Peter Betjemann asks how nineteenth and early twentieth-century craftspeople, writers, and consumers managed craft's traditional attachment to physical objects and activities while also celebrating craft in iconic, emblematic, preeminently textual terms. The durable model of workmanship that was created around correlations of craft and narrative, physical process and representation, and body and text blurred the boundaries between craft and its consumption. Discussing a wide range of material from fiction and essays to artifacts, the book explores how the era paved the way for the vitality and the viability of a language of craft in much later decades.

`Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!' A powerful poem of universal guilt and a protest against capital punishment, The Ballad of Reading Gaol is Wilde's best-known poem, yet it is quite unlike the rest of his poetry. At Oxford Wilde discarded the passion and politics of his mother's Irish nationalistic anti-famine poetry and opted to follow an English Romantic tradition, paying tribute to Keats, Swinburne, and the Pre-Raphaelites. Admiration of French masters gradually led to his writing Impressionist, even decadent poems and his collection Poems (1881) brought accusations of obscenity and plagiarism as well as scathing reviews. Unabashed, Wilde revised and reprinted his final `Author's Edition' in 1892, by which time he was the successful author of fiction, criticism, and Lady Windermere's Fan. This volume follows as closely as possible the chronological order of composition, highlighting autobiographical elements including the young Wilde's conflicting attitudes to Greece and Rome, pagan and Christian, and his fluctuating attraction to Roman Catholicism. The Appendix shows Wilde's original ordering, constructed with great care around a `musical' arrangement of themes. The poems reveal unexpected aspects of a literary chameleon usually identified with sparkling wit and social comedy. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older - the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.' Anne Elliot seems to have given up on present happiness and has resigned herself to living off her memories. More than seven years earlier she complied with duty: persuaded to view the match as imprudent and improper, she broke off her engagement to a naval captain with neither fortune, ancestry, nor prospects. However, when peacetime arrives and brings the Navy home, and Anne encounters Captain Wentworth once more, she starts to believe in second chances. Persuasion celebrates romantic constancy in an era of turbulent change. Written as the Napoleonic Wars were ending, the novel examines how a woman can at once remain faithful to her past and still move forward into the future. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. .

Before he trailed off into the wilds of Mexico, never to be heard from again, Ambrose Bierce achieved a public persona as "bitter Bierce" and "the devil's lexicographer." He left behind a nasty reputation and more than ninety short stories that are perfect expressions of his sardonic genius. Brought together in this volume, these stories represent an unprecedented accomplishment in American literature. In their iconoclasm and needle-sharp irony, their formal and thematic ingenuity and element of surprise, they differ markedly from the fiction admired in Bierce's time. Readers familiar with the classic "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" will want to turn to Bierce's other Civil War stories. Also included here are his horror stories, among them "The Death of Halpin Frayser" and "The Damned Thing," and such tall tales as "Oil of Dog" and "A Cargo of Cat."

THE ULTIMATE GUIDES TO EXAM SUCCESS from York Notes - the UK's favourite English Literature Study Guides. York Notes for AS & A2 are specifically designed for AS & A2 students to help you get the very best grade you can. They are comprehensive, easy to use, packed with valuable features and written by experienced experts to give you an in-depth understanding of the text, critical approaches and the all-important exam. * An enhanced exam skills section which includes essay plans, expert guidance on understanding questions and sample answers. You'll know exactly what you need to do and say to get the best grades.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDES TO EXAM SUCCESS from York Notes - the UK's favourite English Literature Study Guides. York Notes for AS & A2 are specifically designed for AS & A2 students to help you get the very best grade you can. They are comprehensive, easy to use, packed with valuable features and written by experienced experts to give you an in-depth understanding of the text, critical approaches and the all-important exam. * An enhanced exam skills section which includes essay plans, expert guidance on understanding questions and sample answers. You'll know exactly what you need to do and say to get the best grades. * A wealth of useful content like key quotations, revision tasks and vital study tips that'll help you revise, remember and recall all the most important information. * The widest coverage and the best, most in-depth analysis of characters, themes, language, form, context and style to help you demonstrate an exhaustive understanding of all aspects of the text.

Pamela in Her Exalted Condition follows the heroine of Richardson's hugely popular first novel into married life. In the process, he explores both the experience of women beyond the stage of courtship and provides a fascinating insight into the social and cultural life of the mid eighteenth century. The first ever scholarly edition of the novel, this volume features a critically edited text, general and textual introductions, full annotations and textual apparatus. Appendices describe all the editions published in Richardson's lifetime as well as early nineteenth-century editions. The original illustrations from the popular octavo edition of 1742 and Richardson's index are reproduced. The publication of this novel in the Cambridge edition allows the sequel to Pamela to take its rightful place in the critical study of Richardson's development as a novelist.

In 1836 the 23-year-old Dickens was invited by his publishers to write `a monthly something' illustrated by sporting plates. Thus the Pickwick Club was born: its supposed `papers' soom outgrew their origins and became a brilliantly comic novel, still among Dicken's most popular works. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Witty, inspiring, and charismatic, Oscar Wilde is one of the Greats of English literature. Today, his plays and stories are beloved around the world. But it was not always so. His afterlife has given him the legitimacy that life denied him. Making Oscar Wilde reveals the untold story of young Oscar's career in Victorian England and post-Civil War America. Set on two continents, it tracks a larger-than-life hero on an unforgettable adventure to make his name and gain international acclaim. 'Success is a science,' Wilde believed, 'if you have the conditions, you get the result.' Combining new evidence and gripping cultural history, Michele Mendelssohn dramatizes Wilde's rise, fall, and resurrection as part of a spectacular transatlantic pageant. With superb style and an instinct for story-telling, she brings to life the charming young Irishman who set out to captivate the United States and Britain with his words and ended up conquering the world. Following the twists and turns of Wilde's journey, Mendelssohn vividly depicts sensation-hungry Victorian journalism and popular entertainment alongside racial controversies, sex scandals, and the growth of Irish nationalism. This ground-breaking revisionist history shows how Wilde's tumultuous early life embodies the story of the Victorian era as it tottered towards modernity. Riveting and original, Making Oscar Wilde is a masterful account of a life like no other.

Into a compellingly real portrait of nineteenth-century Russian society, Dostoevsky introduces his ideal hero, the saintly Prince Myshkin. The tensions subsequently unleashed by the hero's innocence, truthfulness, and humility betray the inadequacy of his moral idealism and disclose the spiritual emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate him. Myshkin's mission ends in idiocy and darkness, but it is the world that is rotten, not he. Written under appalling personal circumstances when Dostoevsky was travelling in Europe, The Idiot not only reveals the author's acute artistic sense and penetrating psychological insight, but also affords his most incisive indictment of Russia's struggling to emulate contemporary Europe and sinking under the weight of Western materialism. This new translation by Alan Myers is meticulously faithful to the original and has a critical introduction by W. J. Leatherbarrow. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.